


The Likes of You Again

by hollycomb



Category: Lost
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:14:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/pseuds/hollycomb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gault and Keamy knew each other before Widmore hired them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is still one of my favorite things I've ever written.

The Kahana leaves port on a cloudless afternoon, headed southwest toward an unnamed island that most of the crew will never see from less than eighty miles out. Huston Gault is grateful for the work but full of trepidation. He's never been offered this kind of money for such a straightforward journey, and very little has been asked of him outside of discretion, but the farther they get from familiar shores, the less straightforward the journey seems. He hasn't even met half of his crew, a scattered group of scientists, soldiers and scowling deck hands, most hand-picked by Widmore. They've got twenty days until they reach their coordinates, and he's not used to policing strangers who are working for someone else.  
  
For the past ten years he worked out of Elliston, running a small-time commercial fishing operation. He didn't make much, but he made his own rules and picked his own crew. It wasn't a bad life when he could hold together a good group of guys, but he's getting too old for that sort of work. Widmore's money won't set him up for the rest of his life, but it will give him a head start. He scoffs, thinking of himself as an investor. He's worked with his hands all his life, and even playing Captain to a corporate vessel such as this one feels like deceptively easy money. He doesn't trust the situation, but he thinks he can still get away with the payoff, until he sees Martin Keamy standing across the deck and leering at him.  
  
He shakes his head, blinks a clean slate across his eyes and looks again. A trick of the light -- the man who is looking at him, sleekly mountainous and clearly one of the soldiers, can't be that goddamn kid from Rockhampton. There is no way Martin Keamy could have survived to adulthood, let alone have the nerve to cross paths with Gault again. He's walking across the deck, carrying a gun. The way he wields the weapon is a subtle threat, not overt, quite artful, and fuck all, it is him.  
  
"I know you," he says to Gault, as if he's still trying to work out how, as if those six months when they both lived in Keamy's mother's house weren't memorable by his standards. If not, he must have had a hell of a life so far.  
  
"Yeah," Gault says, then realizes he should admit to nothing. "How's that?"  
  
Keamy's grin splits across his face like a knife unsheathed. He knows Gault is bluffing, always could see right through him.  
  
"Rockhampton," Keamy says, with the condescending lilt of someone who has decided they don't need the satisfaction of calling attention to their companion's lie. "You and my mother."  
  
Gault almost winces but catches himself, swallows the impulse with an audible click. He feels cornered, wishes he were taller.  
  
"Right, right." He laughs, sort of. "Fuck, mate." He can't really look at Keamy, now. "How about that?"  
  
"Yeah." Keamy stares until Gault looks back. He's got the same eyes he had back then, which seems illegal, almost perverse. "Are you on the crew?" he asks.  
  
"I'm the Captain, actually."  
  
Keamy laughs uproariously in a way that is somehow only unkind after he stops himself.  
  
Gault walks away like he's lost a bar fight, stunned as if pummeled. He doesn't stop walking until he reaches his quarters, ignoring several crew members who try to speak to him on the way there. His stateroom seemed comfortable and impressive when he boarded just a few hours ago, but now it feels like a broom closet, someplace he ducked into in a panic, not really safe or intended to house anything significant.  
  
He sits on his small bed and rubs his hands together, tries to recapture his sense of gravity. The weight of what is happening has not fully settled on him yet, and he ducks it, squints around the room in willful confusion. He thought he was in love with that bloke, once. He was out twenty thousand dollars for it last time, and now Keamy is bigger than him, landscaped with guns and almost certainly more criminally insane than he was at seventeen.  
  
Gault would laugh at the circumstances, but in fifteen years he still hasn't developed a sense of humor about what happened in Rockhampton.  
  
*  
  
Gault met Crystal Keamy in a bar called Mr. C's. He was thirty years old and had been stumbling around Rockhampton for a little over a year, drinking and getting fired a lot. He was then still making a career of mourning his divorce, not because he missed his ex-wife but because he felt she had beaten him at a belittling game he hadn't meant to participate in, and had proved him worthless in the meantime.  
  
Crystal was American, blond, and seven years older than him. She looked just mean enough to be good in bed.  
  
"I needed a change," Crystal said when Gault asked how she'd ended up in Australia. "Like, a new country. Like, that kind of change."  
  
"Right." She seemed like the kind of uneducated woman who had chronically bad taste in men and was always running away from one or another of them, but maybe Gault only thought so because she was interested in him.  
  
They went back to the house she was renting near the steak restaurant where she waitressed, had sex and fell asleep at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a Sunday, and neither of them had anyplace to be. When they woke up, Gault grilled a rib-eye on her back porch and she kept the beers coming. The invitation to stay indefinitely was clear from the beginning; she was humming with happiness as she moved around the kitchen fetching ingredients for the marinade, glad for his continued company. Normally he'd be very put off by this, but he wasn't a kid anymore, and it had been awhile since anybody had shown an interest in taking care of him.  
  
"You're not married, are you?" she asked him while they ate on her back porch, sitting on the top stair with their plates in their laps.  
  
"Not for five years," he said. "You?"  
  
"Hell no. I've got a kid around here somewhere. Good for about as much as his pop was."  
  
"A kid?" Gault turned around, expecting to see a dour eight-year-old watching them through the sliding glass door.  
  
"Don't worry." She grinned. "He's on his way out of here. Soon as he turns eighteen he wants to go back to the States and join the army. That'll be next year, in February. Until then he's stuck with me. I don't know where he's sleeping lately, haven't seen him in two weeks."  
  
"But he lives here?" Gault asked, disliking this.  
  
"Yeah. Doesn't hang around much, though. Not what you'd call a mama's boy, that one."  
  
"What about his dad?"  
  
"What about him? He's a con artist, stole three thousand dollars from me and left me pregnant. Told me his name was Richie Arnold but hell if I believe that now."  
  
She went quiet then, like she was afraid she's said too much. Gault felt oddly protective of her, and slung an arm around her shoulders, chewed steak near her ear. She smiled at him, put her plate down and hugged her knees.  
  
"You're not a creep, are you?" she asked.  
  
"I don't think so."  
  
"I know." She kissed his chin. "I can tell just by looking at you."  
  
*  
  
Gault had been living with Crystal for a little over a month, working for a house painting operation and generally laying low, when he drove home to find a crusty pickup truck in the driveway. He was startled, thought maybe one of Crystal's various violent ex-boyfriends had come after her, but by her account they were all in America. It didn't occur to him until he walked into the kitchen and saw a teenage boy standing at the sink in his underwear, eating leftovers out of a tupperware container, that the truck might belong to Crystal's prodigal son.  
  
"Jesus, sorry," he said, turning around as if he'd walked unannounced into the bathroom. "You must be Martin," he called back when he was safely in the living room.  
  
"Whoa," Martin said. He followed Gault into the living room, still wearing only gray boxer briefs and still eating two day old pork tenderloin with his fingers. "She told you my name? Fuck, are you engaged?"  
  
Gault laughed, then realized it was a serious question.  
  
"No."  
  
Martin shrugged and walked back into the kitchen, chewing with his mouth open, loud enough to hear throughout most of the house. He was tall, with hair buzzed short enough to be mostly colorless. He had Crystal's sharp features, but his eyes were blue.  
  
Gault left the house, felt evicted. He went to Mr. C's and did a few shots, had a few beers, and hoped that when he got back Martin would be gone. He returned after dinner time to find his truck still parked in the driveway, now alongside Crystal's car. He let out his breath, drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and thought about what Crystal had told him. The kid was moving out soon, anyway. Maybe he was only here for a night or two.  
  
"There you are!" Crystal said when he got inside. She was clearly a bit panicked by the timing of his late arrival, and popped up from the bar that looked into the kitchen when Gault walked in. Martin, who was dressed now, was asleep on the living room couch, a fishing show muted on TV.  
  
"He's just back for a few days," Crystal assured Gault at once. He smiled and pretended not to mind.  
  
"Do you think he hates me being here?" he asked Crystal later, when they were climbing into bed. Martin hadn't moved from the couch all evening, as if instead of sleeping elsewhere he hadn't slept at all since he'd been gone.  
  
"He's indifferent," Crystal said. "He used to be all kinds of mean, but now he's too cool for that. I've never known what to do with him. He's his father's child."  
  
"How do you mean?"  
  
"Totally inscrutable. I've known him all his life and he might as well be a stranger."  
  
Gault felt sorry for the kid, hearing Crystal admit defeat. Martin seemed like a fairly average teenager. He wondered if Crystal associated him too deeply with the con man who'd abandoned her.  
  
"So he's not here to make my life miserable?" Gault asked, mostly joking.  
  
"There's no telling why he's here. But it won't be for long. Trust me."  
  
She was wrong about that. Martin stayed mostly on the living room couch for the next two weeks, as if he was recovering from a flu. Sometimes Gault sat in an armchair to watch TV with him, and Martin did not protest or attempt to speak to him. Crystal seemed to think that if she ignored the boy he would leave sooner, and in fact there was very little talking in the Keamy household at all during this period.  
  
"What's your name?" Martin asked Gault one night when they were puttering around the kitchen at the same time, Gault going for another drink and Martin eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.  
  
"Hasn't your mother told you?"  
  
"She told me, but I forgot."  
  
Gault laughed and cracked open a beer. Martin stared at him, waiting.  
  
"Huston," Gault said, raising the beer as if to toast him. It was close to nine o'clock, Crystal was closing at the restaurant and Gault was pretty drunk.  
  
"Like the city?" Martin asked.  
  
"Sort of."  
  
"Is that what you're named after?"  
  
"No. I was named after my dad's brother. He fought in World War II and then he killed himself. How about you?"  
  
"How about me what?"  
  
"Who're you named after?"  
  
"Some fucking actor."  
  
Gault smiled, and Martin scoffed, bit his own grin away. Gault walked back out to the living room with his beer, feeling proud of himself. He didn't understand why Crystal didn't make more of an effort with the kid. He was clearly bored, probably lonely -- Gault hadn't seen any evidence that he had friends here -- and not so bad.  
  
The following week, Gault fell off of a ladder at work, broke his ankle and cracked a rib. The house painting company was decent enough to provide insurance, and for the three months required for his ankle to heal he was paid to do nothing but sit at home and watch TV. At first he resented Martin always being there, but eventually he grew to appreciate the company, and he got the impression that Martin did, too.  
  
"You're not in school?" he asked Martin one afternoon when they were putting sandwiches together in silent tandem.  
  
"It's summer." Martin looked at him like he was an idiot, and Gault felt ridiculously wounded by the gesture, almost laughed out loud at himself. He'd gotten used to the fact that he'd probably never have his own children, and maybe he'd grown fond of the idea that Martin was someone who might look up to him.  
  
"Your mom told me you want to join the army?"  
  
Martin made a disgusted face. "The Marines," he said.  
  
"Oh, right, maybe that's what she said --"  
  
"No. It's okay. She's an idiot."  
  
"Jesus, mate." Gault couldn't bring himself to say anything further. In some sense he was probably right, but it wasn't on to talk about your mother like that. Still, Gault had nowhere near the authority to tell Crystal's kid what to do.  
  
"Mate," Martin mimicked. "You know, when I first moved here, it was like, 'fuck, people really _say_ that here?' It seemed made up, you know what I mean?"  
  
"No." Gault laughed. "You miss America?"  
  
"Whatever. Not really. Every place is the same."  
  
"You'd know, eh? A real world traveler, are you?"  
  
"No. I just mean any place that has people in it." He watched Gault for a reaction, checked to see if this resonated. Gault had to look down at his sandwich. For a moment, he suspected he was being conned. At any rate, he knew exactly what the kid meant now.  
  
*  
  
Two weeks into his rehabilitation period, Gault was dozing on the couch around three o'clock in the afternoon when someone pounded on the front door. He sat up groggily and saw Martin hurrying to answer it. When he pulled the door open a surly-looking Maori man stood there glaring at him.  
  
"Calm down," Martin said. "I'm coming." He walked back off toward his room, and the Kiwi stayed in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest.  
  
"You're a friend of Martin's?" Gault asked, a nervous alarm pulsing at the back of his head. The man started at Gault for a moment, then looked away without answering. Martin came jogging out of the back hallway with a paper bag curled in his fist. He left with the man without looking back at Gault, and slammed the door behind him.  
  
"Martin went off with a Maori bloke today," Gault told Crystal at dinner. She'd microwaved some half-dead bubble and squeak, lit candles. They were working on a bottle of wine.  
  
"That right?" She barely looked up from her plate.  
  
"Yeah, he had a bag with him. Sort of urgently went off, didn't say a word to me." Gault tried not to show that he'd been offended by this. "You don't think he's fooling about with drugs, do you?"  
  
"Could be, but I doubt it. He's obsessed with getting into the army. He tries to stay out of trouble, these days."  
  
"The Marines."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"Isn't it the Marines he wants to join up with?"  
  
"Sure, the Marines. What's the difference?"  
  
Martin was gone for ten days. Being alone in the house made Gault antsy, and he missed having someone to eat lunch with. Crystal came home sometimes to join him, but it wasn't quite the same with her chattering about the people she hated at work. He longed for the emptiness of Martin's companionship, the contented silence of being with someone who expected nothing from him.  
  
"Aren't you worried?" Gault asked Crystal one night after they'd had sex. She was rubbing the lotion that Gault hated on her legs. It made her smell like an old lady.  
  
"Worried about what?" Sometimes the irritated way she returned his questions reminded him very much of Martin.  
  
"Is it normal that you don't hear from Martin for ten days?"  
  
"Has it been ten days already? Of course I'm not worried -- when he leaves for America, do you think he'll say goodbye? No, I'll just go into that pig sty room of his one morning and all his clothes will be gone."  
  
Gault hadn't considered looking in Martin's room, but for some reason the idea was immediately appealing. When Crystal left for work the following evening, he hobbled down the hall and opened the door. The room was messy, but also weirdly impersonal. Martin hadn't hung any posters on the yellowing walls, there were no pictures of friends or pin-up girls scattered about, no action figures lined up on his desk. Clothes were crumpled all over the floor, and a collection still-damp towels hanging over the closet door gave the room a musty scent. Gault peeked into the closet and saw old board games and other toys stacked up and gathering dust. He got down on the floor to look under the bed, wincing as he manipulated his ankle and tested his still-healing rib, but found only empty shoe boxes and a bicycle pump.  
  
Disappointed, he left the room and went to look out the front window, peered up and down the street as if expecting Martin to be on his way back now. A couple of weeks ago, he never would have thought he'd actually want the kid around. He wasn't sure why he did, but he let the ache for the sight of him open in his chest like something poisonous, breathed it in and liked the feeling even as it worried him.  
  
He fell asleep on the couch that night, waiting for Crystal to return from her shift. When he woke up in the middle of the night he found that she'd pulled a blanket over him. The kitchen light was on, and he rolled over to see what she was fussing with in there.  
  
Instead of Crystal he saw Martin, standing near the stove and unwrapping something -- cellophane? He sat up and realized that it was a roll of bandages, and that Martin was standing in a puddle of blood.  
  
"Christ!" Gault said, shooting off the couch, and Martin turned to give him a look of hellfire.  
  
"Shut up!" he hissed.  
  
"What happened?" Gault asked, not even registering the request. When he came close, Martin shoved him in a light sort of way that Gault found endearing.  
  
"Keep it down, alright?" Martin's arm was sliced open, and he was doing a bad job of trying to dress the wound himself.  
  
"Did you clean it?" Gault asked, and Martin shoved him again, harder this time. He had bags under his eyes like he hadn't slept in days. Suddenly Gault didn't want Crystal to wake up, either. She would not be horrified enough by the sight of Martin painted in his own blood.  
  
Gault took the gauze from Martin and wrapped his arm in a clean dishtowel, then wound the bandage around it. Martin watched him work with relative disinterest, sniffing occasionally.  
  
"Are you on drugs?" Gault asked when he was finished. Martin snapped his hard blue eyes up to Gault's.  
  
"I wish," he said.  
  
Gault wanted to kiss him, and that was definitely odd.  
  
*  
  
Gault doesn't see Keamy for the first two days of the voyage, mostly on purpose. He hides in his stateroom, though he knows this will undermine his ability to lead the crew. He's beginning to doubt himself anyway, wonders how he got this job. It's all lining up like some kind of joke, and he wouldn't be surprised if Keamy was the one who arranged it, though Gault can't imagine what he'd get out of it except a laugh, and Keamy was never big on doing anything unless he could turn a more tangible profit.  
  
When he finally goes up to the deck around midnight to get some air, he knows Keamy will ambush him, and is almost disappointed when he's left waiting at the stern, shaking like he just went off drinking yesterday and won't make it through the night. He's lucky, actually, that he's stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. If there's liquor on board he doesn't know how to get it.  
  
"Jesus, your hair is _gray_."  
  
Gault jumps out of his skin when Keamy appears suddenly behind him. It was not the reaction he hoped to have at their inevitable meeting, and he pulls a hand self-consciously through his hair.  
  
"You stole my money," he says. It was supposed to be, maybe, an insult to match Keamy's, though Keamy was probably not intentionally insulting him, only making a blank observation, as ever, but when he hears himself say it he knows that Keamy will take it as a compliment.  
  
"Okay, prove it." Keamy looks wistful and content. On him, it's a disturbing combination.  
  
"Did you sign on to this -- mission -- knowing I'd be here? Is that why you've come?"  
  
Keamy laughs. "Why would I do that, Captain? I don't need your money anymore, and you haven't got anything else I want."  
  
Gault turns back toward the ocean as if to dismiss him. Keamy doesn't move for a few moments, then Gault hears his boots stomping heavily across the deck as he goes. He hopes to God that Keamy really thinks that he's got nothing left worth taking. He can't know that Gault is already feeling painfully charitable, like he would give up a lot just to hear Keamy admit that he wanted it all along.


	2. Chapter 2

On their sixth day at sea, Gault is awakened by pounding on his door, and Minkowski, the communications officer, tells him they've come off course somehow. This doesn't make any sense, and Gault goes up to the steering room to straighten things out.   
  
"How could this happen?" he asks, looking at his navigation equipment with Minkowski and two other crew members hovering behind him. He's reset the course, but they've wasted half a day heading in the wrong direction.  
  
"Don't look at me," Minkowski says, as if Gault is accusing him -- someone -- of sabotaging the equipment. It hadn't even occurred to him, but after it does he's almost sure that's what has happened. He thinks about what Widmore told him when he was hired -- _there are complexities to this voyage that I'm trusting you not to take any interest in_. Gault had assured him that he was not interested, but that was before these complexities became his problem.  
  
He learned how to handle a ship of this size in the Navy, but that was two lifetimes ago. Historically, he splits himself in three -- before his divorce, after his divorce, and after he quit drinking. The period after his divorce is not one he likes to reminiscence about, though sometimes, when he really wants to get drunk, he does remember the days when he could with genuine fondness. The fact that a walking reminder of that time in his life is on board his big shiny corporate ship is the omen he's been afraid of through twelve years of sobriety. This is the thing that will turn him around, set him hopelessly off course, and he doesn't have to wonder who is responsible for the sabotage. It's his own fault. His mistakes were always going to haunt him; he just wishes they hadn't sent such a menacing ambassador.  
  
Going past the armory, a collection of soldiers watch him pass. Keamy is not among them. They have a suspicious sort of look, like Minkowski had in the steering room, and it makes Gault feel as if everyone here knows more about what's going on than he does. But what is going on? They're sailing toward an island where they will retrieve a man named Ben Linus. As Gault walks on toward his stateroom he wonders for the first time why the soldiers have brought such an impressive cache of weapons. What are they expecting Ben Linus to wield?  
  
When he arrives at this stateroom he's too preoccupied with his thoughts to notice that he's not alone until he shuts the door behind him. Turning toward his bed, he sucks his breath in sharply when he sees Keamy sitting on it, elbows on his knees.  
  
"Fucking bastard," he exhales when Keamy grins. "I didn't see you sitting there."  
  
"That's not my fault."  
  
"What do you want?"  
  
He hates that he's glad to see Keamy, the familiar warmth of a self-destructive urge pooling in him.   
  
"I don't want anything," Keamy says. "I told you."  
  
"Right, and you're certainly known for telling the truth. Get out, then, if you're not after anything."  
  
That was bad phrasing; Gault busies himself with untying his boots to hide his exasperation. Keamy shifts on the bed, the mattress springs squeak, and Gault feels as if they're stuffed into the coffin-sized quarters of a tiny fishing boat, not ten feet apart from each other in the stateroom of a gigantic freighter.   
  
"Well?" Gault throws out his hands and finally looks back at Keamy, who will wait forever in silence if Gault lets him. He doesn't get uncomfortable and is never in a hurry.   
  
"Well," Keamy says, in poor imitation of Gault's accent. He leans back, tips his knees apart, and it's too tacky to really be effective. "How've ya been?" he asks.   
  
"Get out."  
  
"You don't really want me to."  
  
"Don't feed me your crap. I've had my fill of it. Congratulations, Martin, you fucked me over when I was a drunk and an idiot. It won't happen again." He stops himself before he can intimate that this was also back before he'd realized that he preferred men to women, and that learning this was like getting sober with a better payoff. He can thank Keamy for that, but if he hadn't come along, someone else would have. Gault would have preferred someone who wasn't a teenage sociopath.   
  
"Nobody calls me Martin anymore.”   
  
"How fascinating. You can leave now."  
  
"You trying to tell me you've stopping drinking?"  
  
"No." Gault's face burns. "I'm asking you to go."  
  
"You weren't really a drunk though, were you?" Keamy sits up, moves in for the kill. Gault is still on the other side of the room. "You didn't seem that bad to me."  
  
"Get the fuck out of here."  
  
Keamy knows he's serious this time, and walks out of the room with a defeated smirk.  
  
*  
  
Martin refused to tell Gault how he'd been injured, who the Maori man was or where he'd disappeared to for ten days. With the weather growing warmer toward the end of the year, he began spending his afternoons not in front of the television, but out back in a plastic pool, where he would doze with his neck crunching the edge of the thing into a comfortable shape. When the sun started to sink he would rise like a zombie and jog around the sketchy neighborhood for an hour. Gault wished that he could go with him. He wished that he was younger and stronger and that his ankle would heal faster. He felt like an old man, a cripple, and a pervert.   
  
"How do you have the energy to run when you've been in the sun all day?" Gault asked one evening when Martin returned home, drenched in sweat and stinking to high heaven.   
  
"I don't know." Martin was still out of breath, seemed irritated by the phenomenon.  
  
"So you're training then? For the Marines?"  
  
"I guess."  
  
They stared at each other, still standing on the house's sagging front porch. The sky was heavy and orange, the air a thick comfort. Crystal was at work. She was always at work.  
  
"How's your arm doing?" Gault asked, nodding to the bandage that was still twisted around it.   
  
"I don't know." Martin had been terse and moody since he returned from his ten day absence, but maybe he had always been that way.   
  
"Well, is it throbbing? Or anything?"  
  
Martin grinned in a way that made Gault hope he was imagining things. He made a face that was supposed to convey offense, or something, looked away and then back.   
  
"I'll take it off in the shower," Martin said. "See how it looks."  
  
"You -- what?"  
  
"The band-aid."  
  
The childish way Martin referred to the gauze on his arm as a band-aid left Gault with nothing to do but walk away. He was getting himself in trouble; this was what he did best. Without his normal routine of work, booze, sleep, repeat, he was going crazy, maybe predictably. And his ankle still had at least two months worth of healing to do.  
  
Gault killed three beers while Martin was in the shower. He had the TV on but couldn't really pay attention, listened intently for sounds from down the hall. He heard the whine of the shower being turned off, the pad of Martin's bare feet across the hall, and then some miscellaneous shuffling. He turned the volume on the TV up, but still heard Martin shout "fuck!" clearly enough.  
  
"What?" Gault called back. He sat stock straight and turned the TV off like it was something he didn't want to be caught looking at.  
  
"Ughh, God, this stupid thing!"  
  
"What? What?" Gault was afraid to move.   
  
"Damn -- _fuck_!"  
  
Gault got up off the couch and moved cautiously down the hall. Martin was still hissing and cursing inside his room, but he wouldn't answer any inquiries as to why.  
  
"Is it the bandage? Do you need some -- uh -- are you dressed? Do you want me to come in?" _Can I come in_ sounded too horrible.   
  
"Fuck this fucking fucker!" was the only response Martin offered. Gault turned into the doorway of his room -- the door was open, and he assumed it was safe enough. Martin was sitting on his bed with a towel draped over his lap. Gault would have turned around directly, but Martin had unwound the dirty gauze, and his eyes were wet with frustration as he tried to pull the dish towel Gault had used to stop the bleeding away from the wound.  
  
"It's like, stuck," he said. "It's like, pulling my fucking skin off."  
  
"Okay, okay." Gault didn't really know how to deal with this, and he was drunk. This was how he normally functioned, however -- clueless, hazy, a shade below frantic. He knelt on the floor to have a look at the wound. "It doesn't look infected," he said. His heartbeat was thrumming between his ears like an earthquake he'd swallowed. He didn't want anything from Martin, not really. Being near to him when he wasn't dressed was not pleasant. He wanted, maybe, to be him, to go back in time. It was some kind of pre-middle age crisis, he decided.  
  
"This is my fault," Gault said. He took hold of the dish towel.  
  
"No shit."   
  
Gault looked up at Martin with an expression meant to convince him of his sincere guilt, and Martin smiled down at him, his eyes lidded and world-weary. Want flicked through Gault like floodlights, and he basked in it briefly before battering it down again.  
  
"Okay," Gault said in a reverent whisper. He ripped the dish towel away in one quick motion, and Martin screamed so loud Gault was surprised the electricity didn't flicker. He cursed Gault with spitting enthusiasm, and Gault put a hand on his shoulder to keep him still. He fumbled with the roll of clean gauze that had slid against Martin's leg, found a starting point and re-wrapped the wound, which was bleeding again. Martin was breathing so hard Gault could feel it on the top of his head.   
  
"That was a dumb idea, the towel." Gault tried to keep the shake out of his voice, couldn't tell if he'd succeeded or not. "I was in a panic, I wasn't thinking."  
  
"The fuck were you so panicked for?"  
  
"You looked like you'd just walked out of a horror movie."  
  
"So? What do you care?"  
  
Gault didn't answer. Martin scoffed and stroked a hand carefully over his fresh bandages. He took a deep breath and let it out, looked back at Gault.   
  
"You like me," he said. Gault judged this as a sort of insult at first, then realized it was more like Martin was speaking as if Gault wasn't really in the room, like he was making this observation in detached hindsight.  
  
"Get dressed," Gault said with feigned disgust. He walked out of the room, his vision receding at the edges, tunneling. It returned slowly when he reached the kitchen, and he touched the cool door of the fridge but didn't open it. He went back out to the couch and sat down to stare at the TV, only turned it on when Martin walked out of his room wearing a t-shirt and flannel pajama pants. He sat beside Gault, who found the domesticity of the scene -- the scent of soap lingering on Martin, the blurred television noise, bugs whirring on indifferently outside -- heartbreaking, disturbing, and perfect.   
  
"You still won't tell me how you got that cut?" Gault asked, only because he felt one of them should say something. He didn't really want to know. Martin leaned toward him, stared very intently at his ear.  
  
"You know what I'd do for five thousand dollars?" he asked, nearly breathless in anticipation of answering his own question.  
  
"What?"   
  
"Anything."  
  
Gault felt the word shatter through him. It rolled down the back of his neck and punched at his heart, landed finally in his lap.   
  
"What the fuck do you mean by that?"  
  
"Nothing. Just trying to make conversation." Martin smiled so sweet it turned mean all over again.  
  
"So you'd kill someone for five thousand dollars?" Gault asked.  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Even women? Children?"  
  
"What the fuck difference would it make if it was a man or a woman? And who'd want to have a kid killed?"  
  
"Never mind who, would you do it?"  
  
Martin let his head tip back onto the sofa cushions and looked at the TV as if he'd find his answer there.   
  
"Only if they were older than fifteen," he said.  
  
"What about a million dollars?" Gault asked. His heartbeat was a pounding presence in his throat, and he was afraid he would forgive Martin anything, because he smelled so good, because he was too young and dumb to know better. "Would you kill someone younger for a million dollars?"  
  
"I don't need a million dollars. I only need five thousand."  
  
"Why? What for?"  
  
Martin shut his eyes as if this was a very philosophical question and Gault was a fool to expect a simple answer.  
  
"That was neat how you did that," he said. "How you pulled that thing off of me like that. I didn't think you'd do it."  
  
Gault was going to scoff and dismiss this, or apologize again for hurting him, but Martin turned and looked at him with a new respect, and he kept his mouth shut.   
  
"I guess people don't surprise you very often," Gault said. Martin watched him without blinking, his lips parted. He was trying to make a decision. Gault would have waited forever.   
  
He was relieved when Crystal came through the door, and it was the worst kind of relief, being saved from something he might have done but never could have gotten away with.  
  
*  
  
Crystal bought a Christmas tree made of silver tinsel and set it up in the front window ten days before the holiday. She asked Gault what he wanted, and he told her a new wallet would be nice. Inwardly, he cursed the question. Now he would have to buy her something, and he had no idea how to shop for a woman. There had been many bitter fights around Christmastime between he and his ex-wife.   
  
"What do you think your mum wants for Christmas?" he asked Martin one afternoon when they were sitting out in the backyard, in the shade since it had reached ninety degrees at midday. Martin was drinking a slushie from the Quick Stop down the road, and it had turned his lips blue.  
  
"I dunno," he said. "Some dignity?"  
  
"Shut it." Gault shoved him and Martin grinned. Anytime Gault could draw his wicked smile filled him with stupid bliss, though he did hate it when Martin picked on his mother. Crystal had a hard won sense of independence that Gault admired, and he continued to feel protective of her, though she was also, as far as he could tell, not a very good mother.  
  
"Should I get anything for Martin, for Christmas?" he asked Crystal later. They were up late watching a movie on television. Martin was sulking in his room, as he always seemed to do when his mother was around.   
  
"God no, he'd just turn around and sell it," she said. "I always give him money, but you don't have to do anything, he won't expect it." She stared at the TV for awhile, rubbed her fingers across the palm of her left hand. "It's funny, you asking that," she finally decided to say.  
  
"Why's it funny?" Gault's chest pinched up as if it had suddenly shrunk two sizes. He wasn't sure if he was more afraid of losing Crystal or Martin to his interest in both of them.   
  
"My boyfriends have always hated him."  
  
"Well, they were a bunch of assholes."  
  
"Yeah." She smiled as if Gault was a dear child, confused by something. "But Martin returned the favor. He hasn't convinced you he's your friend, has he?"  
  
"I -- no -- but he's -- we get along alright."  
  
"Just be careful with that one." Her sense of amusement seemed to pass. "He's vicious until he wants something, different kind of vicious when he thinks he can get it."  
  
"What exactly did he do to you?" Gault hid his disapproval with a laugh. "I mean -- I mean. I guess I just want an example."  
  
"So he has convinced you, then?" She smiled differently now.  
  
"No," Gault lied. "But he hasn't convinced me he's some kind of monster, either."  
  
Crystal's face fell, and Gault felt terrible. He pushed his lips together as if he could slide the words back in.  
  
"I don't think he's a monster," she said.  
  
"Of course not, I just meant --"  
  
"I love him, actually," she said. "That's the problem."  
  
"The problem?"  
  
Crystal looked back over her shoulder at the darkened hallway that led toward Martin's bedroom. His door was shut, and no light came from beneath it.   
  
"He's not receptive to it," she said. "But he'll trick you into thinking that he is. Then he'll look at you blank-faced and tell you what he really thinks of you, how much really values you -- or doesn't, I should say."   
  
Gault opened his mouth to ask again for an example of this behavior, then shut it. He wanted to tell her that all teenagers fight with their parents, they say horrible things, that it's normal and they don't mean them, but he could already hear her response: _you don't have kids, how could you know?_  
  
He ended up buying her an Ace of Base CD for Christmas; she loved it. That night, after she'd fallen asleep on the couch, he went into the backyard, where Martin was lighting Roman candles and watching them shoot into the sky. Gault walked up behind him and held a fifty dollar bill in front of his face. Martin blinked at it for a moment, then turned back and smiled at him with such unfiltered joy, Gault wished he'd given him a hundred.  
  
"Merry Christmas, anyway." Gault cleared his throat. "I know you didn't get me anything, so don't worry about it."  
  
Martin’s smile became a smirk. In his memories of this moment, Gault would understand it like the ocean clearing the shore, pulling back to gather in a tidal wave.   
  
“Here,” Martin said, and when he grabbed his arm Gault was afraid for a moment that he was holding a lit firecracker. He kissed Gault on the mouth, and Gault took it like a punch, stumbled back out of his grip.   
  
“What the fuck!” he hissed. He looked back at the house, afraid to see Crystal watching this tender holiday moment from the porch, but the windows were dark.   
  
Martin turned back to his Roman candles, lit one and held its canister while it left the earth with a whining hiss.  
  
“Serves me right, trying to be nice,” Gault said, louder now. “I’m not trying to fucking _buy_ you!”  
  
Martin watched the Roman candle explode in the sky, then looked down at the smoking husk in his hand, as if he’d expected something more impressive.  
  
“I know,” he said. “If I thought you were, I’d have stabbed you instead.”  
  
Gault got away from him as fast as he could.   
  
*  
  
When Gault woke up the following morning, he found Crystal in the kitchen toasting instant waffles. She was cheerful and still wearing her bathrobe, had another day off of work. He checked the couch for Martin.   
  
“Did you sleep well?” Crystal asked when Gault sat down at the kitchen table.   
  
“Yeah,” he lied. He hadn’t slept at all, had spent the past eight hours staring at the ceiling, his heartbeat shaking the bed. For the first hour, he could still hear Martin outside, shooting fireworks, waiting for him to come back. Gault considered it seriously, even hours after Martin left the yard, the whine of insects replacing that of Roman candles.  
  
“Where’s Martin?” he asked when he felt enough time had passed.   
  
“Search me. Why? Did you two have plans?” She winked at him to ease the meanness of the accusation. Gault knew he was already in trouble, but he’d spent the past eight hours realizing that he couldn’t wait to make things worse.   
  
He had never been affected by a kiss from a woman, not even when he was young. Those had only been precursors to whatever else he was trying to get, a way to keep from looking at each other while clothes were awkwardly scrabbled off. But the taunting peck that Martin had assaulted him with had already become operatic in his mind, though it was the precursor to nothing, and in fact he could think of nothing physical that he wanted from Martin except more of what he’d already had –- quiet proximity, his mouth a clumsy shock and then gone again.   
  
Crystal went shopping for after Christmas bargains, and Gault stayed home to eat leftovers and wait for Martin to return. His fingers itched, and he wished he’d learned earlier in life how good it felt to want something unnamable as if it were breath itself, though it was agony, too, and he was suffocating from it as the minutes passed and Martin remained gone. He drank six beers, and Crystal came home at five o’clock with drive-thru burgers for dinner.  
  
Martin stayed away, and the remainder of the year passed like a decade of famine for Gault. He couldn’t get drunk enough, couldn’t make himself have sex with Crystal, and couldn’t stand the sight of the television without Martin beside him to regard it with his noncritical eye, watching long strings of shows on one channel because he didn’t care enough to change it. He avoided every mention of Martin’s name, didn’t want to continue to arose Crystal’s suspicion, and not being able to talk about him in even the most banal context was excruciating.   
  
On New Year’s Eve, Crystal asked Gault to join her at a co-worker’s party, but he told her his ankle was bothering him, that he wanted to take a painkiller and have a whiskey and go to sleep, fuck the New Year. He expected her to be more bothered by this than she was. She had one foot out the door before he could finish his refusal, kissed his forehead and told him there was cold pasta in the fridge.  
  
Gault took two painkillers and had three whiskeys. He was wrecked on the couch by nine o’clock, sniggering at commercials on television. He hallucinated bats hanging in the corners of the dark living room, and when he heard the front door open he shut his eyes, waiting for Crystal to drape a blanket over him before heading back to the bedroom.   
  
“Hey.”   
  
Someone slapped his foot, and Gault opened his eyes to see Martin standing over him like a vision, white t-shirt and jeans and looking like he’d aged three years since Christmas. Gault was not prepared for this. When he sat up, the room swam.   
  
“I didn’t see her car. I didn’t think anyone would be here.”  
  
“It’s okay.” Gault stood with some difficulty, rubbed his hands over his face. When he took them away, Martin was gone. Gault saw the light flip on down the hall, in Martin’s bedroom. He walked over to lean in the doorway, watched Martin collecting t-shirts from the floor, shaking them as if to get the wrinkles out.   
  
“I’m just getting some stuff,” he muttered when he saw Gault watching him.   
  
“You should stay.”  
  
“Yeah. Okay. No thanks.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
Martin glared at him. Gault didn’t know how to tell him what he’d come to know since he had seen him last: _I can’t live without you, I can’t give you a single reason why, I can’t understand how I’m not even worried about what is happening to me_. There was a distinct possibility, given his condition, that these things and worse might come out of his mouth.   
  
“Listen,” he said, catching Martin when he was on his way past him. “You don’t have to leave because of what happened. Fuck it, if it comes to that, I’ll leave.”  
  
“Why? She’d rather have you here.”  
  
“No. I don’t know, maybe. But you have to finish school so you can join the Marines. It’s only a few more months and you’ll have your degree.”  
  
“Jesus.” Martin sneered at him. “You’ve, like, thought about this?”  
  
“Yes. Yeah. Don’t act so surprised.”  
  
"I'm not surprised!" Martin yanked away from him. "I'm not fucking surprised, okay?"  
  
"Martin—"  
  
He started off down the hall and Gault grabbed for him without thinking, found his arm and was confused for a moment when he screamed and jerked away in pain. Then he remembered the cut and cursed himself.   
  
"Sorry, mate, I'm sorry—"  
  
Martin was curled against the wall, hugging his arm with his back to Gault. The t-shirts he'd come for had crumpled to the ground.   
  
"When's the last time you changed that bandage?" Gault asked. He spoke over the roar of confusion in his ears, wasn't sure if he was grateful for the painkiller haze or furious with himself for coming to this moment without the full use of his facilities.   
  
Martin only shook his head slowly, seemed to be gathering strength for something. Gault wished he would simplify things by turning to punch him in the face, though that would also ruin his life.  
  
"Come here," Gault said. "You haven't changed it since I helped you, have you? Come on, we'll clean it up before you go."  
  
He was surprised when Martin followed him back into the bedroom. Gault found the roll of fresh gauze still on his bedside table. He went into the hall bathroom and ran a towel under some warm water before returning to Martin, who had taken his t-shirt off and was beginning to peel the old gauze away, hissing as he did.  
  
"Here, let me." Gault put the towel over his shoulder and took Martin's wrist in his hand, carefully peeled away the remainder of the gauze. He could feel Martin's heartbeat under his thumb. He smelled like fake blueberries, and Gault thought of the Quick Stop, his slushies.  
  
"Be still," Gault said, though Martin wasn't moving. He was speaking more to his own hands, which were shaking badly. He tried to forget himself, and the less definable scent of Martin's skin that was beginning to overpower the artificial blueberry, watched blackened bits of blood flake away as he rubbed the towel carefully over his cut.   
  
"Who did this to you?" Gault asked.  
  
"Nobody."   
  
Something about the way he said it made Gault finally look up at him. Martin stared back with his usual unguarded expression that nevertheless revealed nothing. Gault wanted to kiss Crystal's feet for creating him. He wanted her to appreciate him so that he wouldn’t feel like the burden to do so fell entirely to him. At the same time, he was glad there was no one else. As the last hours of the year ticked away, he felt they were alone together at the end of the world.   
  
"You know how sometimes when it's been awhile since anybody’s said your name, and then somebody does, and it sounds weird?" Martin said. "Like, you didn't forget what your name was, but you, like, forgot that you even had one?"  
  
"Yeah." Gault had no idea what he was talking about. The scene turned stupidly perfect as it dawned on him that he would remember it forever: the pinkish light from the lamp beside Martin's bed, the whir of the air conditioning unit outside his window, the sunburn on his collarbone that had staled to a blush.  
  
"Well. I like the way you say my name. You know? It's dumb. _Mahhh_ -en."  
  
Gault kissed him. In the end, it was all his fault. Martin left his injured arm at his side, but slid the other around Gault's waist, then up under his t-shirt, across his back. He opened his mouth under Gault's, tipped himself open like a picked lock. Gault held his face with one hand and drew him in tight with the other, felt the skin at the small of his back like a burn along his forearm. Martin was warm and solid like nothing in the world had been so far. His breath hitched when the shape of Gault's lap pressed against his, and Gault crushed him into his arms, was afraid to open his eyes.  
  
"God," he moaned. "I've never done this, I'm sorry, I've never done anything like this."  
  
Martin pulled back to survey him, and Gault was afraid of what he would see. A trembling fool, a washed up ex-sailor who collected insurance money and watched a lot of television.  
  
"Me either," Martin said, and for a moment Gault didn't know what he was talking about.  
  
"We can stop," Gault said. He held up his hands. "You can stay, I can go, whatever you want."  
  
Martin narrowed his eyes. "I'm not staying here if you don't."  
  
Relief went through Gault like a wave, and it ripped him down again when he realized he still didn't know what to do next. He retrieved the gauze from the floor, where one of them had dropped it at some point. He was still shaking as he re-wrapped Martin's arm, but Martin was perfectly steady, calm under his hands. Gault got the feeling he was lying when he said he'd never done this.   
  
"So," Martin said. "Anyway. Say it. Alright?"  
  
Gault frowned at him for a moment, let this sink in. When he realized what was being asked, he did as he was told. He said Martin's name over and over again, until it was just a hum, his mouth on Martin's cheeks, forehead, eyelids. Martin went limp-happy in his arms, and for a moment Gault actually thought he'd fallen asleep. When he finally leaned back to grin at Gault with hooded eyes, Gault waited for him to ask for something that would be much harder to give.  
  
"Let's watch TV," Martin said, dreamy like this was all he had ever wanted.   
  
It was what Gault wanted, too, a hard-on that he wasn't prepared to do anything about sinking as they made their way to the living room. Gault expected Martin to fall against him, maybe lick his neck while they stared at the television, but he sat on the other side of the couch as if what just happened was already irrelevant.   
  
"Come here," Gault said, stopping himself before adding that his mother wouldn't be back for hours. Martin looked briefly confused, then crawled across the couch to rest his head on Gault's leg, which was, again, not quite what he had expected. Gault curved his arm over Martin’s side, tracked the rise and fall of his breath. His hair was getting longer now, bleached red-blond by the progress of the summer, and Gault raked his fingers through it while the TV counted down the end of the year. He watched Martin doze off as the ticker at the bottom of the screen marked out the last minutes, felt his bones grow heavier with sleep. He would have agreed, in those quiet seconds that passed as the New Year arrived, to nothing but this for the rest of his life.  
  
He was almost asleep himself when he heard Crystal's key in the door. He jerked awake without thinking, essentially kicking Martin in the head. Martin sat up with a wince and Gault didn't have time to apologize before Crystal was through the door.  
  
"Well, well!" she said, clearly drunk. "You're back."  
  
Martin rubbed his temples and blinked in the light of the television. Gault's heart had jumped into his throat, and it left something that felt more like a rock behind when it sunk back into place. He looked desperately to Martin, who avoided his gaze and glowered at the TV. In the dark glow of the new year, he thought he could see the person Crystal had warned him about in the corner of Martin's narrowed eye, in the unforgiving set of his jaw. Later he would be convinced he was only imagining things; Martin drew back to him easily the next morning. It would be years before he realized what really happened that night, that Martin didn't really come back to him at all, if he'd ever really been there to begin with.  
  
"Did you have a nice night?" Crystal asked him when they were in bed. She leaned up onto his shoulder and pulled at him lightly, trying to get him onto his back.  
  
"I'm kind of groggy, really," Gault said, hoping she couldn't feel his heart still hammering as hard as it had when she came through the door.   
  
"Martin didn't bother you?"  
  
"No, no."  
  
"Funny he came back."  
  
"Why's it funny?"  
  
"I just had the feeling he might have gone for good. Did you talk him into staying?" She squeezed his shoulder; it might have been a joke.  
  
Gault pretended to be asleep.  
  
*  
  
On their tenth day at sea, the air conditioning unit in Gault's stateroom breaks. The heat is like a inescapable force sent to drive him insane, and it's working. He has to leave the room more often, risking confrontations with Keamy and bothersome interactions with the rest of the crew. He's beginning to suspect that in a few more days he'd pay back all of Widmore's money and then some just to get off this goddamn ship.  
  
He should have started smoking in AA like everyone else. Leaning on the ship’s railing near the prow well after midnight, he wants something in his hand, and because it can’t be a beer, it might as well be a cigarette.   
  
He hears Keamy in his head even before the slide of his footsteps on the deck: _you didn’t seem that bad to me_.   
  
“Fuck off,” he says, though he doesn’t mean it. Wanting to drink all the time was always about more than getting high. It was about fucking things up. It’s what he feels especially called to do, even now, trying halfheartedly to fight it for the sake of whatever’s left.   
  
Keamy leans onto the railing beside him, watches the featureless ocean. Gault loves and hates the way his face has changed in fifteen years. He looks meaner, which is good, appropriate, and the bags under his eyes are more obvious. He looks a little worn out and sad, but Gault knows now that this is an act.   
  
“So you’re a hired gun,” Gault says, wishing again for a cigarette, something burning on his lips, ash to flick into the wind. “Whatever happened to serving your country?”  
  
Keamy looks at him sideways, doesn’t need to tell him now that all of that was a load of shit. He never had anything like a country.  
  
“You got off easy, anyway,” Gault says. “Linus is a middle-aged man. Supposedly a killer himself. Not so hard to kill types like that, I guess.”  
  
“You think he’s the only one on that island?” Keamy seems to regret saying this, and Gault watches his face fall. The only time this ever happens is when he’s disappointed with himself. It’s impossible for him to be disappointed in anything else; he expects too little of everything.   
  
“Fine.” Gault turns back to the water, doesn’t want to notice the shine of his unshaven face in the dim light from the moon. He’s not attractive in the way that Gault has ever found anyone else to be. He’s something else, a force like a riptide, like every addiction that has been Gault’s life’s work.  
  
“Kill whoever you want,” Gault says. He doesn’t mean this, but he doesn’t believe Keamy about other people on the island. Widmore made some wild mentions of the Oceanic flight that crashed, said that Linus had something to do with a cover up, but Gault assumed it was a ploy to throw him off of whatever more traditionally unsavory business was afoot.   
  
“Whoever I want?” Keamy pinches the back of Gault’s neck, and laughs when he slaps his hand away.   
  
“You know what? You want to hear a story?” Gault asks, infuriated. Keamy scoffs but doesn’t leave.   
  
“When I was young, you know, I was married,” Gault says. “My wife was really into birds. She had feeders and watched them all the time. She got upset one summer because one of her favorite birds was raising a cowbird baby. Do you know what cowbirds are? They lay their eggs in the nests of other species, and they get rid of the mother’s actual eggs, and so the mother bird raises their babies for them, not knowing. She expends all her energy raising the chicks of a bird who murdered her real children. And my wife would get torn up about this, when she saw a mother feeding a baby who was already bigger than she’d ever be, still holding on to the delusion.”  
  
Keamy isn’t looking at him, but Gault knows he’s listening.   
  
“And I would always think, okay, but what do the baby cowbirds think? Do they think this is really their mother? Or are they in on the con? And if they’re not, how do they know, when they grow up, how do they do the same thing all over again? I know it’s inherent, I know they’re just birds. Of course they can’t empathize. But they must grow up trusting their surrogate mother. Trusting that she won’t wise up before they have to fend for themselves.”  
  
“Wow.” Keamy sniffs, flips his hands up and lets them smack back onto the railing. “You’ve spent the last fifteen years thinking about this shit, haven’t you?”  
  
“You counted the years.” Gault is truly stunned. Keamy’s eyes dart to his, his cheek twitches. Gault beams a taunt at him.   
  
“You counted the fucking years.”  
  
Keamy claps a hand over his on the railing, hard, and Gault is startled, tries not to let it show. He leans in close, and Gault hates being the smaller one now, but it was always going to happen. Even when Keamy was seventeen, he was as tall and nearly as heavy as Gault.  
  
“I hope you spent my money on something fucking fantastic.” Gault feels like he’s already speaking into Keamy’s mouth. He’s all around him like a chemical shower, poison he wants to swallow in gulps.   
  
“Why are you here?” Keamy says, his voice so rough it’s got to be put on, at least a little bit.  
  
“Maybe it’s fate, Martin.”   
  
“Don’t call me that.”  
  
“It’s your fucking name.”  
  
“Not the way you say it.”  
  
And then he falters for a moment, but maybe it’s just a cloud across the moon. He’s gone in three steps across the deck, disappears like a fog clearing, and Gault is buried up to his neck again like it all happened yesterday. He had his moments of doubt in the program, watching people in the real world drink and not regret it, but now he knows all the old drunks were right. It’s one fucking sip and you’re underwater in an instant, a million miles from shore.


	3. Chapter 3

Gault loses the ability to sleep through the night, and doesn’t really miss it. He’s reluctant to shut down and miss something, feels now like he’s guarding a junkyard, keeping an eye on things for the sake of nothing especially important. He drinks coffee constantly, and becomes acquainted with the others who hang around the machine in the ship's kitchen. The most frequent visitors are Daniel Faraday, one of the scientists, and Frank, the helicopter pilot. Frank occasionally tips whiskey into his mug, and one afternoon he notices Gault's eyes widening at the sight of it.  
  
"Want some?" he asks, holding it up.  
  
"No, no," Gault says. "I'm -- I can't."  
  
"Gotcha," Frank says with a wink. He turns to Faraday, who is sipping his own coffee with a far away look on his face, his skinny arms tucked in around the mug. "You?" Frank offers. Daniel turns and frowns in brief confusion.  
  
"Oh, oh -- no thank you," he says. "Alcohol makes me, um, fuzzy? And I have to kind of concentrate, in order to, uh, stay in one place." He wanders away, and Frank watches him go, smirks at Gault.  
  
"That's a different way of putting it," he says, and Gault grins.  
  
Gault begins spending time with Frank, playing cards and talking about their experiences in the Navy, Gault in Australia and Frank in America. Having an ally on board increases Gault's sense that he has gained some sort of edge over Keamy, and he's less closed up and nervous. Faraday fixes the air conditioning unit in his stateroom, and he no longer feels trapped when he retires to quarters.  
  
"Can I ask you something?" Gault says when he's sitting up on the deck with Frank one morning, watching Keamy and the other soldiers take target practice with automatic weapons.  
  
"Sure." Frank is an open book, quite unlike everyone else on board.  
  
"How did you find out about this job?" Gault asks. "Did Widmore call you directly?"  
  
"No, somebody who worked for him called me up. They said they'd heard of me, which I thought was kind of odd."  
  
"I thought the same thing," Gault says. "They said they knew my company -- I had a fishing operation in Elliston for awhile, but it wasn't anything someone like Widmore would care about. They knew I'd been in the Navy."  
  
"Me too," Frank says. They both turn toward the soldiers.  
  
"What do you think about them?" Frank asks. Gault scoffs.  
  
"That's kind of a long story."  
  
"How's that?"  
  
"I knew one of them." Gault's heart tremors hard, the sticky shake of the caffeine in his veins making him bolder than perhaps he should be. "Before. That big bloke with the machine gun."  
  
"Oh, him." Frank laughs. "He's a real charmer, isn't he?"  
  
Gault grins at the joke even as it knifes through him. He's not about to tell Frank that Keamy once charmed him out of twenty thousand dollars.  
  
"Was he in the service with you?" Frank asks.  
  
"No, he was a Marine. I knew his mother, in Rockhampton."  
  
"Knew her?" Frank says. "Or, like, _knew_ her?"  
  
"We lived together for awhile." Gault is beginning to regret this line of conversation very much. "Anyway, I thought it was weird, Widmore hiring both of us."  
  
"How did Widmore find him?"  
  
"I don't know, haven't asked. He'd probably lie to me if I did. We're not exactly friendly."  
  
"That right? He didn't like you fooling around with his mother or something?"  
  
Gault watches Keamy take a shot, his target spinning out over the ocean. He fires and it shatters. From this distance it looks like he smashed the thing apart with some invisible force, like he glared at it and it was destroyed.  
  
"Or something," Gault says.  
  
He crashes around dinnertime, takes a long nap in his stateroom and wakes up slowly, basks in the renewed air conditioning. He's hungry, but still half asleep, so he gets a towel and heads for the showers down the hall. He tries to keep the water cold, but can't stop himself from adjusting the temperature again and again, until it's hot enough to steam around him. He shuts his eyes and puts his hands against the cool tile of the open shower, hoping no one else will come in to the locker room. Instead of waking him up, the hot water is lulling him back to sleep, and it's not a bad feeling.  
  
He's in such a pleasant daze, the water running down his front and the steam fogging around his ears, that he doesn't register the sound behind him as a wet footstep until he feels two big hands close over his hipbones. Panic slices through him until he realizes it's Keamy, leaning onto him and flattening him against the tile wall. He sinks under the flush of his skin, but the panic returns when he realizes again: it's Keamy. He's got fifty pounds on Gault, all muscle, and Gault loses his breath against the weight of him.  
  
"Get off of me," he says. He doesn't know how the hell Keamy got undressed in the locker room behind him without making a sound, but he might have just walked down the hallway naked. He's not exactly modest.  
  
"Don't worry," Keamy says. "I locked the door."  
  
"That's not what I'm fucking worried about, actually."  
  
Keamy slides his teeth over Gault's ear, and he twitches, can't decide if he's cold or hot, pressed between the freezing tile and the searing warmth of Keamy's skin. The flux between the two snaps through him like a charge, and he's hard as hell already, bites down a whine when Keamy pins his hands.  
  
"Bet you missed fucking me," Keamy says. Gault wonders if he's bitter about the fact that he wasn't always on top, in control. But that's not true; he was, he always had a plan.  
  
"Not really." It's a lie and Keamy knows it, or he wouldn't be licking up the back of Gault's neck, setting off brittle goosebumps. "Wasn't worth the money."  
  
He's not sure if this is a dig at Keamy or himself. It's been his greatest fear, since Keamy took him for everything he had, that he only gritted his teeth and did what he had to do, hated it. Of course, if that were true, he probably wouldn't be here now. Gault has nothing left to take. Even if it's some sort of victory fuck he wants, Gault is ready to give it freely. He's open wide for him, legs apart, wanting it like the first swallow of the binge that will kill him.  
  
"Wasn't worth it, huh?" Keamy reaches for Gault's cock, pulls him back from the wall to make room for his slippery hand to stroke down the length of it. Gault hears himself make some sort of idiotic gurgling noise, doesn't care enough to be embarrassed.  
  
"You'd get hard just looking at me," Keamy says, grinning in his ear. His hand is still moving, slow, and he holds Gault still with his other arm when he tries to buck in his grip.  
  
"You used to come when I said your name," Gault says, sick of his smugness. Keamy grunts unhappily and presses him onto the wall again.  
  
"What's the matter?" Gault asks, high off of the fact that he's gotten to him. "Can't look me in the face when your hand's on my dick?"  
  
Keamy spins him around so fast that Gault gets the wind knocked out of him when his back finds the wall again. His vision refocuses, and for a hysterical second he thinks he sees smoke pouring out of Keamy's nose, but that's just the steam from the water.  
  
"What are you doing?" Gault asks, delirious, afraid to touch him. "What do you want with me anymore?"  
  
Keamy stares at him, and Gault searches his eyes, feels his own eyes sting at the corners when he can't find anything there.  
  
"You're right," Keamy says, stepping back. He lifts his chin and looks down his nose at Gault, then walks over to the lockers. Gault is going to curse him for leaving him in such a state, but he won't give him the satisfaction, instead turns around and braces himself against the wall. His arms are shivering almost cartoonishly. He listens for the sound of Keamy dressing behind him, and holds his breath when he hears three wet footsteps instead. He thinks, wild with some primal fear: _now he'll kill me_.  
  
"Fine, fucking smart ass," Keamy says, falling onto him again. He yanks Gault back until he's almost bent at the waist, jamming his cock against the small of Gault's back. Gault scrambles for traction, breathlessly happy, sucking in steam. Keamy strokes him off more urgently now, his cock moving over Gault's back with the same rhythm. Gault wants to cry out, _why don't you just fuck me_ , then remembers this is a test, an experiment, some kind of challenge.  
  
"Say it." Keamy's teeth are clenched tight, Gault can hear it. "Say it, motherfucker, and we'll see."  
  
"Martin," Gault moans, wanting this to work. He thinks of Martin on that twin bed in Rockhampton, his head tipped back onto Gault's shoulder, eyes lidded, mouth open, knees apart, listening for his name.  
  
Gault says it twenty times before he comes in Keamy's hand. Ripped in two by the relief of it, he lets himself fall forward, rests his forehead on the wall and breathes in gulps. Keamy is still hard on his back, and this doesn't come to him as a disappointment until a few long moments have passed.  
  
"Right," Gault says, straightening with great effort. "There you have it. Maybe you never wanted me. Just the money. Fuck. If that's true, I'm sorry."  
  
He turns around to look at Keamy, surprised that he hasn't already walked away. He waits to be pushed to his knees, even wants it, a hand in his hair to guide him while he sucks Keamy off. Keamy is staring at his shoulder, and he takes a step forward, then another, until his lips are on Gault's temple. Gault reaches down to wank him off, but Keamy's hand is already there.  
  
"Say it."  
  
Gault can barely hear him, but he feels the words on the thin skin of his temple, where his heartbeat is pumping steadily, a quiet drum that shakes his whole body. His puts his hand on Martin's waist, which is firm and slick like the rest of him. He's chiseled himself so that there is nothing soft to reach for; even his lips are smooth and tight.  
  
"Say it," he begs, and Gault sucks in his breath, feels as if he's alone on a stage with the lights dimming around him.  
  
"Martin." Gault keeps his voice clear and careful, puts his mouth against the edge of Martin's ear.  
  
"Say it, I -- again, say it."  
  
Every time he asks, Gault does, his voice sinking lower and lower, his thumb barely moving on the tight skin above Martin's hip. Martin deflates around him like he's sliding into bed, stroking himself off as if Gault's voice is a rhythm working in his hand. He goes tense when he comes, and wrenches what might have been a scream against the side of Gault's head with a jerk of his neck. Their skulls crack together and Gault sees stars, locks his arms around Martin to keep himself upright. He feels as if he's just swum the English Channel, can barely stand. The steam from the shower has thickened to a choking consistency, and he reaches over to turn off the water. Martin is still mostly collapsed, regaining his balance and avoiding Gault's eyes.  
  
"You can come sleep with me if you want," Gault says, and he can't believe this shit, how easily he's been trapped and how unconcerned he is about it. He's convinced himself that he's got nothing to lose, nothing that Keamy would want.  
  
"Right." Keamy scoffs and walks away. Gault watches him dress and leave the locker room, and tries to remember if it was the same back then, if he felt like he had nothing to lose when Martin was desperate under his hands, and only learned that he did when he was gone.  
  
*  
  
Martin started his final term of secondary school in January. His truck disappeared about five days prior, and Crystal asked him about it during one of his rare appearances at breakfast.  
  
"I sold it," he said with a mouth full of Weet-Bix.  
  
"Sold it?" She whirled from the sink to look at him. "That's great, really smart. How will you get to school?"  
  
"Huston can drive me."  
  
Gault suddenly understood the thrill of at last hearing his name said out loud. When he looked up over his cereal bowl he saw Martin watching him with wicked anticipation. Gault's face burned like an alarm; he wanted to cover it so Crystal wouldn't see.  
  
"As if he's got nothing better to do," she said.  
  
He didn't, actually. His doctors told him he could start work in mid-February at the earliest, and he was nearly bouncing in his seat at the chance to chauffeur Martin around. Before Martin had started climbing onto him during their television watching sessions, it had seemed as if they were always alone together, as if Crystal was a remote figure who sometimes visited. Now that they came together like magnets as soon as she left, her time at work seemed criminally brief.  
  
"I don't mind," Gault said. "It's okay."  
  
"You're so good," Crystal said. She kissed the top of Gault's head, and something about the gesture made him think she was doing it to show Martin up. He gave Gault a crooked smile when her back was turned again, made his face burn hotter.  
  
Crystal set their alarm for the first morning of school, and when it blared at seven AM Gault catapulted himself out of bed, a half-formed nightmare of being late for work ricocheting around him. Crystal rolled over and tucked the comforter over her ear.  
  
He stumbled into Martin's room, half-blind and happy for the right to be there. He often worked himself up, just before falling asleep beside Crystal, thinking about how he could sneak into Martin's room and cup himself around him for a few hours. He hadn't tried it yet.  
  
"Wake up," he said, rather unenthusiastically. He sat down on the end of Martin's bed, yawned. Martin was under the blankets, unmoving. When Gault reached over to give him a shake, Martin clasped his wrist like a zombie waking from the dead, and Gault cursed as Martin laughed and yanked him down to the pillow.  
  
"You have to go to school," Gault whispered when Martin clutched at him, drew him under his blanket. He kissed Gault like he did on New Year's Eve and always after, like it was the end of the world and they had to fit this in. Gault fell into it for a moment and then pulled back, a spiderweb of spit stretching from Martin's lip to his.  
  
"Don't," he said. "Crazy fuck, look." He nodded at the door he hadn't bothered to shut, not expecting this. His heart rate started climbing as the rest of him began to wake up for real.  
  
"Who cares?" Martin's voice was thicker and deeper than Gault had ever heard it, and he kissed him again just for that. He'd never had him like this, still sticky with sleep at the crack of dawn, the blankets hot with the smell of him.  
  
"Don't have time for this," he said when Martin reached for his lap. All he'd done so far was paw Gault through his trousers, but it was enough.  
  
"You're gonna miss me today," Martin said, rubbing him roughly. Gault wished he hadn't bothered to put jeans on before coming in, but he didn't yet have the nerve. This was all new for him, too. He leaned up over Martin on his elbows, on his knees with his legs spread, and put his face against Martin's neck, rocked against his hand. He tried to remember why he was fighting this -- Crystal, asleep in the next room. Just the thought of her name made him snap his knees together again.  
  
"Stop," he said, his voice flickering with resistance. Martin smiled up at him, folded his hands over his chest.  
  
"Whatever you say."  
  
Gault kissed him, told him he was evil.  
  
Martin chewed his thumbnail on the way to school, something Gault had never seen him do. He was wearing a faded red shirt and cargo pants that were torn at the cuffs. He stayed slumped against the passenger door as they neared the school, and kept his eyes out the window as the radio played traffic and weather reports. Gault was in love with him and wanted to tell him so, but didn't have the nerve for that, either.  
  
"Are you excited to see your friends?" Gault asked.  
  
"I guess. Not really."  
  
"Bet the girls all like your accent."  
  
Martin gave him a disbelieving look. Gault checked his jealous inquiries, pretended not to notice that Martin had seen through them. They pulled into the school parking lot, and Gault stopped at the building's front steps.  
  
"Well, have a good day," he said, feeling ridiculous. Martin looked miserable, and didn't move from his seat.  
  
"You'll be here to get me at 3:30?" he asked Gault, looking slightly panicked.  
  
"Yeah, mate, of course."  
  
Martin stared at him for a few more seconds before throwing open the car door. He slammed it shut and leaned down in the window to wave at Gault before going. Gault felt the dread of entering a school building as if he was headed for class himself, and wanted to call Martin back, take him for breakfast and then home to lean against him on the couch. But Martin had real ambitions, and Gault could vaguely remember what that was like.  
  
He went home to Crystal, but didn't feel right sitting on the couch without Martin. While she slept in, he went into their garage, which was crammed full of rusting junk. He considered spending the day organizing it, making himself useful, but gave up when he found a set of dusty free weights. He took them into the backyard, where Crystal found him doing reps an hour later.  
  
"Trying to get in shape?" she asked, draping herself around his shoulders.  
  
"I've got to do something," he said. "This fucking ankle injury is driving me mad."  
  
"What'll you do without Martin here to entertain you?" she asked with mock sympathy, and Gault turned back to her, his mouth hanging open around a half-formed defense, but she was smiling benevolently, only joking.  
  
Gault was back at the school by three o'clock, waiting in the parking lot. He was afraid that everyone who walked past his car suspected he was a creep, some kind of predator, and tried to look like a respectable parent, though he wasn't nearly old enough to pull it off. He was thirteen years older than Martin, which seemed insurmountable at times and minuscule at others. Regardless, it hadn't slipped past him that this was an unlucky number, one that would never change.  
  
When Martin finally appeared, he was walking alone, his eyes darting around the parking lot until he saw Gault's car. Gault lifted his hand, and he watched Martin's face clear with relief when he saw him. He jogged to the car and threw himself inside.  
  
"Have a good day?" Gault asked.  
  
"Take me somewhere," Martin said.  
  
"What? Where?"  
  
"Anywhere."  
  
Gault drove them to the beach and parked near a motel that had gone out of business. There was no one around; kids getting out of school would go further down the coast to the restaurants that sold cheap pitchers of beer to anyone who looked vaguely eighteen. Martin was in his lap as soon as he turned the car off, and Gault pushed the seat back, kissed him and drew both his hands up under his t-shirt. He took in the heat of skin like a badly needed shot, felt it burn down through his veins. When Martin reached for the button on his jeans, Gault realized dimly that he hadn't had a drink yet today.  
  
"You wanted me all day?" Martin breathed. It was barely a question. Gault nodded frantically, took Martin's shirt off completely and pulled him close, sucked in the smell of his neck.  
  
"God," Gault allowed himself to say, the dangerous inclination to call Martin _baby_ thrumming through his head. "Martin," he said instead, and Martin slid one knee under each of Gault's arms. He leaned back onto the steering wheel, split open and dazed, his lips wet and shining in the late afternoon light.  
  
"Hey," he said, tugging at Gault's jeans. "I'll do anything you want. Go ahead and ask. Anything."  
  
"I just want to look at you," Gault said, before he could really think about the question. It was true, but he could only stare at Martin for a few seconds before he was kissing him again. He licked his way into Martin's mouth, and dragged him forward so that their laps were pressed together. Martin sighed with his whole body, wrapped his arms around Gault's neck. Gault knew from experience that it would only take a few minutes of fidgeting before they'd both come in their pants, but they were farther than usual from a change of clothes.  
  
"Your mum's at work until ten," he said. "We could go back to the house."  
  
"I can't wait," Martin said, his breath hot on Gault's face. "Please."  
  
Those four words nearly finished Gault off, but he redirected his attention to Martin, watched him slide the zipper on this trousers down.  
  
"Here," he whispered. "Okay?"  
  
Gault kept his eyes on Martin's, knew that if he looked down at what his hand was doing his orgasm would tear him in half. Martin's cock was straining to peek out of his boxer shorts, and when Gault's thumb slipped through the slit at the front and found skin, Martin's shoulders jerked. Gault took his hand away and apologized furiously.  
  
"No, please --" Martin grabbed Gault's hand and brought it back. It took one careful slide of his fingers inside Martin's shorts to finish him off, and Gault followed suit when Martin arched back onto the steering wheel, chest heaving, sweat gathered in the hollow of his throat. He pulled Martin to him and shuddered around him, wanted to weep or laugh or something more than his body knew how to do. Even after he finished he still felt like he'd swallowed dynamite, like it would blow him to pieces and would probably feel pretty good.  
  
Martin dozed on Gault's shoulder while he watched the sun start to sink toward the ocean. Gault tipped his head against Martin's and petted him lazily, wishing he had a beer to make the moment perfect. His anxiety was beginning to rebuild. They would have to go back, and Crystal would come home, maybe wanting to fool around like she always did after her late shifts. Gault was too worn out and disinterested, and being with Crystal was beginning to feel like cheating. He was starting to worry about the future, starting to make plans, but wasn't stupid or lovestruck enough not to realize that making plans around a mostly rootless teenager would not be easy.  
  
"You don't want to go to college?" he said as he drove Martin back to the house. They had stopped at a gas station for a slushie for Martin and a six pack for Gault, which he was looking forward to drinking with Martin leaning warm against him, still smelling like too-sweet watermelon syrup.  
  
Martin was quiet for a moment, considering the question. Gault saw his cheeks pucker as if he was chewing them.  
  
"Can't afford it," he said.  
  
"You could get a loan. Or a scholarship."  
  
Martin laughed. "You really think I have good grades?"  
  
"I don't know, why wouldn't I? You seem smart to me."  
  
"Why, because I like fucking around with you?" Martin smirked, and Gault's ribs ached. It always startled him to realize how easily crushable he'd become, and he tried not to think about the situation with any sort of perspective.  
  
"No, that just means you've got good taste," he said.  
  
"You've seriously never done this before?" Martin pulled at his straw until it made a loud squeaking noise against the top of his cup.  
  
"Not with -- you know. And I never thought I would. Did you?"  
  
"Did I what?"  
  
"Did you know -- I mean, have you been after blokes all along?" Gault cringed at his own question, wasn't sure it he really wanted to talk about this.  
  
"It was, like." Martin hugged his elbows, squinted at the windshield. "Like, I was always picking on these guys, you know? Because I thought they were stupid or whatever? But then I was also kind of obsessed with them? And then one time, I was getting ready to punch this one kid, cause I'd followed him or whatever and nobody was around, and I, like. Just kissed him instead. It was weird."  
  
"How old were you?" Gault was burning with jealousy, which was almost hilarious, even to him.  
  
"Fourteen."  
  
"And how did he react?"  
  
"He just sort of stared at me like he couldn't believe it."  
  
"Then what happened?" Gault wanted to be that kid, surprised by a bully falling in love with him, but at fourteen he imagined it would have scared the shit out of him.  
  
"I told him I'd kill him if he told anyone, and I walked off."  
  
"Whatever happened to him?"  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"I mean, is he still around? At school?"  
  
Martin smiled slow, and Gault scoffed, humiliated.  
  
"I'm just wondering if he ever told anyone," he stammered.  
  
"Right." Martin reached over to slap his thigh. "Don't worry, old man. I'm not interested in any of those fuckers anymore."  
  
Back at the house, they ate tomato soup with cheese sandwiches and resumed their positions on the couch. Gault got drunk and fell asleep stretched out on Martin's back, his cheek between his shoulder blades. He'd never been happy like this, not even when he was seventeen himself. He almost wanted Crystal to walk through the door and find them asleep together, but he would have to wait a few more weeks for Martin's eighteenth birthday before he could get that sloppy. He woke up with a start when he heard her car door slam, and dragged himself to bed, leaving Martin asleep on the couch. He hated to do it, and he set the alarm to go off thirty minutes early the next morning.  
  
When it buzzed him awake, he sleep-walked down the hall and slipped into Martin's room. This time he was careful to shut the door behind him. He slid under Martin's blankets, shivering in the air-conditioned dawn, and curled tight around him.  
  
"What are you doing?" Martin mumbled.  
  
"Waking you up," Gault said. "Just give me a minute." He shut his eyes and tucked his face against the back of Martin's neck. He couldn't sleep, it was too risky and Martin had to get to school, so he kept himself awake by thinking that someday he could go to sleep and wake up like this, every night, every morning.  
  
"I don't want you to join the Marines," he told Martin in the car that morning.  
  
Martin snorted, wouldn't look at him. "Why the hell not?"  
  
"You might die."  
  
"That's the whole point."  
  
Gault was horrified. "What?"  
  
"I don't want to do some bullshit job all my life. I want whatever I do to, like, matter."  
  
Gault wanted to shout, _everything you do matters. The sun rises and sets over your shoulders, don't you fucking KNOW?_ He didn't say anything more, didn't want to frighten Martin. He realized for the first time that Martin might just be fooling around with him, killing time before his real life began. It would make more sense than Gault's fantasy that he could somehow convince Martin to stay with him forever.  
  
He didn't dare approach the subject with Martin, but it continued to bother him, and he began to hate the fact that he couldn't talk to anyone about this. Even the most innocent questions about Martin were off limits with Crystal, who chaffed at every mention of her son's name. Gault would have hated her for this if she didn't have a very good reason to be jealous. He was actually impressed that she seemed to have picked up on the strangeness of his interest in Martin, and admired her uncanny intuition. It was something she and her son had in common.  
  
"What do you think I should do for Martin's birthday?" Crystal asked him one night when they were eating at the restaurant where she worked.  
  
"You're asking me?" It felt like a trick question. "Won't you just give him money like you did for Christmas?"  
  
"Yeah, but he's turning eighteen. I don't know, I thought I'd ask you since you spend more time with him than I do."  
  
The mention of Martin's approaching birthday laced Gault's skin with a cold sweat. When he first moved in with Crystal, she'd implied that Martin would leave immediately once he turned eighteen, but his last school term didn't end for another two months. Whenever he did leave, Gault was determined to go with him, though in what capacity he had no idea.  
  
"Honestly, he'll probably just want money," Gault said.  
  
Crystal's smile was a little pinched. "You do know him pretty well, then."  
  
"I guess." Gault stared down at his plate, suddenly didn't know what to do with his knife and fork, how to proceed. "Maybe we could take him out to dinner."  
  
He regretted that as soon as it left his mouth.  
  
Martin surprised both he and Crystal by agreeing to a birthday dinner, and they drove down the coast to a seafood restaurant he apparently liked. They took Gault's car, which made him extremely uncomfortable, as it had by then been the site of many after school trysts. He was uncomfortable anyway, just having Martin and Crystal with him at the same time, and planned on getting terrifically drunk at the restaurant. They were silent on the way there, and Gault felt like he was being tested by both of them.  
  
"Are you going to do track again this year?" Crystal asked Martin once they were seated.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"You're on the track team?" Gault asked, both offended not to know this and glad to show Crystal that he didn't.  
  
"Yeah." Martin looked annoyed, and Gault wondered again why he'd bothered to come. "Season starts in March."  
  
"Still planning to move to America when school's out?" Crystal asked. She sounded like a disinterested aunt, maybe a neighbor, not a mother who lived under the same roof with her son.  
  
"Yeah. I was kind of looking at this one college."  
  
Gault's hope grew to bursting in his chest, and he looked around for a waiter, wanted a strong drink in celebration of this development.  
  
"College!" Crystal squawked. "This is the first I've heard of that!"  
  
Martin gave her a dark look.  
  
"Yeah, well," he muttered. "Whatever."  
  
"Which college?" Gault asked desperately, and the waiter chose this moment to arrive.  
  
"Vodka tonic," Crystal said before he could ask for their drink order.  
  
"Double whiskey, neat," Gault said.  
  
"Yeah, me too," Martin said, pointing at Gault, who was insanely grateful for the gesture, wanted to pull him into his lap and whisper encouragement about college.  
  
"What happened to the army?" Crystal asked.  
  
"The fucking Marines, Mom. And I still want to do that. But I thought maybe I could be an officer or whatever."  
  
"They get paid a lot more," Gault blurted stupidly. Crystal and Martin looked at him like he was interrupting.  
  
"Well, I can tell you right now that I can't help you pay for it," she said.  
  
"Like that's news to me."  
  
Martin and his mother cast identical looks of dry fury across the table at each other, and Gault thought for a moment that there would be a knife fight. The novelty of their similarities was briefly thrilling, then only disturbing again.  
  
Gault got wasted as planned, and spent most of the meal praising the college experience and pretending to lament the fact that he had never gone. Martin drank a whiskey and three beers, and Gault tried not to stare as his chin got closer to the table and his laugh grew louder. He put his foot over Gault's under the table, and Gault had to bite his tongue to keep from gushing declarations of love. Crystal, who had remained relatively sober, drove them home.  
  
At the house, Crystal got in the shower and Gault went to the fridge for a nightcap. Before he could pull it open, Martin fell onto his back, snaked his hands around his waist and hummed a laugh into his ear. Gault reached back to grab his hips, let himself be pushed against the fridge.  
  
"Better cut it out," he said, nodding at the hallway. He could still hear the shower running.  
  
"What do you care?" Martin licked his ear, pulled him in tighter. "You like me better."  
  
"Smug bastard," Gault said. He turned around to tip Martin's face to his, kissed him quick. "Happy birthday, anyway."  
  
"You can fuck me now," Martin said, and the words fell hard to Gault's lap. "Legally."  
  
"I thought the age of consent was sixteen?" Gault had been banking on that.  
  
"For butt fucking in Queensland it's actually eighteen."  
  
"Jesus Christ!" Gault laughed, though he was close to throwing up from some fantastic anxiety. He didn't even know enough about this to want it properly, but he did have an unreachable itch at the center of him that had been growing since he'd first touched Martin's skin, and it was something to do with wanting to be inside him.  
  
"I'm serious," Martin said. "I researched it for you."  
  
"Thanks, mate. You're thrashed, by the way."  
  
"Come sleep with me." Martin pulled him forward by his belt loops. "It's my fucking birthday, c'mon."  
  
The shower turned off with a squeak, and Gault put a hand over his lips to shut Martin up. He wasn't sure what he was afraid of now, except for Crystal's reaction, but he couldn't deal with that yet, not without a plan, a place where he and Martin could go. He had some money saved up, but he'd been thinking all night, drunkenly, about giving it to Martin for college. He pushed Martin into his room and winked at him before shutting the door.  
  
Martin was quiet when Gault drove him to school the next morning. This was not unusual, but it was making Gault nervous nonetheless, because after waking from his initial drunken slumber, he'd spent the rest of the night rehearsing what he would say in the morning.  
  
"Hey," he said, pushing Martin's knee to get his attention. "We need to start, uh. Thinking about some things."  
  
Martin turned to Gault slowly and gave him the violently bewildered look that always made him want to shrink into the earth. Crystal had a slightly milder version. Gault realized too late that Martin was probably terribly hungover.  
  
"What things?"  
  
"Like, about when we're going to tell her." This was not how he had practiced his approach.  
  
"Tell who what?"  
  
"Your mother. About, you know. This."  
  
Martin sat up straight, and Gault was pleased for a moment, thought this meant he was giving the matter serious consideration.  
  
"Are you fucking _crazy_?" he said. "Like she doesn't hate me enough already?"  
  
"Suddenly you care that she hates you?"  
  
It took Gault a few moments to really hear what he'd just said. It was clear enough on Martin's face, and Gault realized then that he'd never actually seen him surprised before, at least not on the surface. He quickly went blank and sunk back into his seat.  
  
"I mean, not that she hates you -- she doesn't -- she loves you, she told me --"  
  
"Whatever." Martin flexed his fists like he wanted to hit something. "You want a bloody death, go ahead and tell her." Gault wasn't sure if this was a warning about his mother's reaction or a personal threat.  
  
"No, I won't. If you don't want me to."  
  
Martin wouldn't look at him. Gault ran through a thousand things he might say to make up for his stupid outburst, but none of them would work now. He'd had no idea that Martin cared about what his mother thought, but maybe it made sense. Gault had hated his father, but had still hoped that he would be impressed by his military career, his beautiful wife. He was glad, too, that the bastard hadn't lived to see him lose both.  
  
"Look," Gault said when they pulled up to the school. "I'm just trying to figure out what to do here. I'm trying to -- I mean, where do you -- I mean --"  
  
"Goddamn," Martin moaned. He threw open the car door, kicked his legs out.  
  
"Wait!" Gault begged. "I'm trying to say that I want you around, okay, for awhile, alright, indefinitely. And I'm trying to -- I mean, is that what you want?"  
  
The disaster of this conversation was eating him alive. Martin stood with his hand on the door, staring at the school's front steps. Other kids were gathered there, laughing and smoking cigarettes, gossiping about problems that were far less than this. Martin looked back at Gault.  
  
"Just be here at 3:30, okay?" His voice didn't quite crack, but there was something splintered in it. Gault nodded, and Martin slammed the door shut.  
  
Gault couldn't make himself return to the house, so he drove down the beach and parked at a bar that was closed for the day. He wanted to get drunk, but needed a clear head. He walked down toward the water and sat for a long time watching the waves. People passed by occasionally, but the beach was mostly empty. The absence of Martin was always unbearable, but it was especially bad after what had been said in the car. Gault didn't know how to explain himself. He felt like he was running out of time.  
  
When he went back to the school at three o'clock, his stomach was nearly bucking him forward with hunger pains. He hadn't eaten anything all day, and was jittery with nerves, afraid that Martin would somehow have disappeared. But when he pulled up to the front steps, Martin was already sitting there, arms crossed over his knees, though classes hadn't let out yet. He got up when he saw Gault's car.  
  
"Is everything alright?" Gault asked when he climbed in. Martin didn't have his books. Gault eyed the long scar that ran from above his right elbow to the middle of his forearm. He displayed it proudly now, unbandaged.  
  
"I'm not stupid, okay?" Martin said.  
  
"I know you're not."  
  
"Shut up and listen for a second!"  
  
"Right, sorry --" Gault drove away from the school, had the feeling he didn't want to have the forthcoming conversation in its watchful presence.  
  
"I'm not stupid." Martin ran his hands down his thighs toward his knees, as if he was trying to smooth his dirty trousers out. "I kind of knew what indefinitely meant. I mean, I knew. But I wanted to be sure, so I looked it up."  
  
Gault was completely lost for a moment, then remembered what he had blurted that morning as Martin was leaving. The pain in his stomach came to a kind of pinpoint pressure that was not entirely unpleasant.  
  
"So did you mean, like." Martin licked the back of his bottom teeth like he was trying and failing to stuff his words back in. "Like, 'vague and unclear,' or, like, 'unlimited'?"  
  
"Martin." Gault couldn't look at him, was on the verge of devastating happiness. "Martin, God, Martin. I want you with me all the time. I can't even stand the idea of you joining the Marines, because you'd be away from me. Don't you know? Can't you tell?"  
  
"Let's go somewhere," Martin said. He was breathing hard. Gault opened his mouth to suggest the airport, another country. "Like a motel."  
  
Gault took him to what looked like the best resort on Rockhampton Beach. It was a cheesy place with retro tropical decor, laid out like a summer camp, fat palm trees planted everywhere. Gault paid for one night in a bungalow near the water, collected Martin and led him there once he had the key. The room was damp but clean, with a loud bedspread and paintings of luaus on the walls.  
  
Once they were inside, Gault didn't know what to do. He went with his instinct and drew Martin to him, smoothed down the back of his hair. They were standing between two queen beds.  
  
"I'm so sorry about what I said." Gault needed a drink, bad.  
  
"What?" Martin pulled back to look at him.  
  
"I -- never mind. Look. What -- what do you want me to do?"  
  
Martin boggled at the question. He looked wrecked, and maybe Gault knew that it was a little bit put on, but he wanted it bad enough to believe him. He kissed him hard before he could answer, got his shirt out of the way and started working on his pants.  
  
"I want to get under the covers," Martin said, speaking into Gault's mouth. Gault nodded, tore his own clothes off as he watched Martin worm under the blankets on the bed closest to the patio. When he was down to his underwear he stopped, his hands on the waistband.  
  
"Are you sure?" he asked. He thought of Martin's alternate definitions of indefinite. Vague, unclear. What more could they be for each other, in a themed hotel room with thirteen years between them?  
  
Martin only held his arms out in response, and Gault slid into them, kissed him everywhere.  
  
They were both clueless, and the effect was surprisingly good. Gault was happy as hell to be doing this with someone else who didn't know anything beyond the fact that lubricant would have to be involved at some point. He got a little bottle of lotion that had the hotel's name printed on it and put it on the bedside table before things could get too serious. Martin was panting and holding onto him like they were dangling from a tree branch, in danger of falling to their death at every moment. Gault wanted to throw back a fifth of something hard and gush for hours about the way the late summer light came in through the sliding glass doors. They looked out on a little patio that faced the backs of other bungalows, but he didn't bother to shut the curtains. No one was around. The earth had been evacuated for the occasion.  
  
"Tell me if it hurts." It was hard to say, and Gault was proud of himself for getting it past his teeth.  
  
"No." Martin's eyes went dull and then quickly bright again, as if he'd blinked with a secret set of eyelids.  
  
"What?" The things Crystal had warned Gault about flicked through his mind.  
  
"I won't tell you if it hurts."  
  
"Martin --"  
  
"Just fuck me." The splinter was back in his voice. "It's going to hurt, I know, it's okay, just do it."  
  
"Why do you want this?" Gault couldn't seem to stop stepping on himself. What a fucking question. His dick was slicked and hard enough to stand in for his heartbeat. Martin was spread beneath him and clawing him closer.  
  
Martin shook his head in disbelief, his fingers twitching on Gault's arms. He opened his mouth, shut it, seemed to want to get angry for a moment but then couldn't muster the energy.  
  
"I want everything," he said. "Everything you have."  
  
Gault, of course, thought he understood what this meant. A twisted cry tore out of him as he slid into Martin, and he hoped to God he wouldn't start sobbing like an idiot. Martin wrapped his legs around his back, clung to him and shut his eyes.  
  
"Please, oh God, please." Gault didn't know what he was begging for, but he couldn't stop. He rocked into Martin with as much restraint as he could muster, not caring that he wouldn't last. Everything around him heightened the intensity of how good this felt: the shape of Martin's chin as he tipped his head back on the pillow, the musty smell of the thin comforter, the color of his own skin against the white sheets. He finished with a growl and drove in deeper than he thought possible, yanked forward by the aching gravity of his orgasm. Martin yelped, and Gault realized what he'd been trying to ask for. He'd bitten down on _tell me if it hurts_ after every _please_.  
  
"Sorry, sorry," he said, withdrawing carefully. Martin's face was pinched and red, his hands tense around Gault's arms. Gault rolled him onto his side, drew him in and stroked his hair, kissed his forehead, shook with guilty relief. Martin revived himself with a shuddering breath, and reached up to slide a finger into Gault's mouth.  
  
"You can suck me off to make up for it," he said.  
  
Gault wanted to sleep for three days when they were finished, contented by the taste of Martin's come on his lips and the thought of Martin still filled up with his. He collapsed onto his stomach and reached across the bed for him, but Martin slid away. He stood naked at the patio doors and looked out at the landscaped property that was supposed to evoke an island paradise. Gault admired the shape of him in the deepening light, started to drift off.  
  
"There's a pool, you know," Martin said.  
  
"Fantastic." Gault's eyes were shut, and he was halfway to dreaming about living here with Martin for the rest of his school year. His ankle was almost healed; when he went back to work he might be able to afford the weekly rate at this place for a few months.  
  
"Let's go." Martin sat down on the bed, spread a hand across Gault's back. "Let's go swim, c'mon, it's not even five o'clock yet."  
  
The mention of five o'clock reminded Gault that he should be drinking, and he wrenched himself awake again with a groan, envisioned margaritas by the pool.  
  
"We haven't got swim suits," he said, rubbing his eyes.  
  
"There's a gift shop."  
  
Gault got dressed and walked back toward the hotel's main complex, found the gift shop and bought anything he thought he could carry. Swim suits, towels, flip flops, sun block, candy bars, potato chips, three t-shirts and an inflatable raft. He wanted to buy every piece of cheerful junk in Queensland and lay it at Martin's feet. He wanted to give him everything he had.  
  
The pool was deserted except for a young couple lingering in the shallow end and playing with their baby, laughing along with her as they lifted her legs in and out of the water. Gault had a tumbler filled with mini bar booze, and he settled on a lounge chair while Martin dove head first into the deep end. He touched the bottom of the pool and swam back up, took a gasping breath.  
  
"Are you coming in?" he shouted to Gault.  
  
"Give me a second." Gault raised his drink. Martin ducked back underwater, and Gault looked down to the end of the pool. The young family was climbing out. The sun was sinking, dinnertime approaching. He watched the mother carefully towel off the baby while the father gathered their things. An employee dressed in a white polo and khaki shorts walked around the pool deck, lighting tiki torches.  
  
Gault watched Martin swim the length of the pool five times. He felt untouchable, and thought without concern of Crystal arriving home from her shift to find both of them still gone. He could go back in three hours and tell her they'd gotten a flat tire, that getting a replacement had been an ordeal. She probably wouldn't believe him, but it didn't matter. Gault didn't want to go back. He sucked in the scent of chlorine and kerosene, shut his eyes and listened to the ice clicking in his glass as it melted.  
  
"Hey." Martin woke him from a shallow sleep, dripping cold water onto him. "I thought you were coming in with me?"  
  
Gault yawned and looked around for the employee who had lit the torches. He was gone, and the whole resort was quiet, only a few far away shouts from children on the tennis courts. He pulled Martin down to his chair and slung an arm around his shivering shoulders, nuzzled him drunkenly.  
  
"I need a refill," he said.  
  
"Yeah, right. Come sit in the jacuzzi at least."  
  
Gault followed him around a closed down concession stand to a bubbling jacuzzi tub that was surrounded by bushes with giant red flowers. He climbed in after Martin, hissing at the temperature. Martin winced as he sat down, and Gault's guilt resurfaced. He stretched his arms out along the tiled rim of the tub, reached over to scratch at the back of Martin's neck with one finger.  
  
"You okay?"  
  
"Yeah." Martin sunk his shoulders under the water. "I'm okay."  
  
"I think this is the best day of my life, mate."  
  
"Yeah." Martin smiled sleepily. "I know."  
  
Gault wanted everything in writing. Being in the world with this kind of joy felt like walking through a crowded bazaar with money falling out of his pockets. He wanted some kind of security, a guarantee, but it was too late to hold out for one. He'd already signed his life away.  
  
"Are we going to sleep here?" Martin asked.  
  
"We can sleep wherever you want."  
  
"What about my mom?"  
  
"I don't know, Martin. What do you want to do?"  
  
Gault prayed that he would express no desire to ever see Crystal again. He watched Martin chew his thumbnail, and knew this wouldn't be the case.  
  
"Well, it doesn't matter if I don't come back tonight," he said. "But we should come up with an excuse for you. Shit -- do you think she'll know?"  
  
Gault shook his head, not in answer to his question, only in exasperation. He checked the pool deck again, and slid over to Martin when he saw that it was still empty. He kissed Martin's damp cheek, held his knee under the water. The sun melted to orange behind them, and the streaky clouds that were hanging low in the sky turned deep blue in contrast.  
  
"Here's what I think we should do," Martin said.  
  
"Alright."  
  
"I think we should save some money and then move to America. There's a school I want to go to there. You could find a job no problem. But we have to wait until I finish school here. And I have to apply and all that shit. So how about in May we'll leave? Cause then, you know what?"  
  
"What?" Gault shut his eyes and put his face against the wilted spikes of Martin's wet hair, could have listened to him talk about their future forever, would have entertained plans for both of them to become astronauts if that was what he wanted.  
  
"Then it'll be the beginning of summer in America, just when it starts to get cold here. So we'll have, like. Two summers."  
  
Even when the betrayal was as fresh as torn skin, even through all the years that he served his long sentence of regret, Gault would never be able to look back at this moment with any sort of cynicism. Nothing could take Martin's plan for their two summers from him, not even Martin himself. It was a lie, like everything else, but it was such a magnificent one, a real work of art, and Gault was grateful for the memory of believing it even after he learned the cost.

Gault spends the remainder of the night staring at the ceiling in his stateroom, going over the worn out details of Rockhampton, picking them apart though they've already been frayed beyond recognition by his obsessive analysis. His exhausted memories are occasionally interrupted by flashes of his encounter with Keamy in the showers, and he shifts his legs about in bed restlessly, not sure if he wants to wank off or take a vow of celibacy before things get worse.

There is only one thing that he knows he wants to do.

Frank’s door is open when Gault reaches his room, and he sees Frank inside, typing on a laptop that is covered in stickers with band names on them.

“Hey,” Gault says, rapping his knuckles against the open door. “You busy?”

“No, c’mon in.” Frank sets the laptop aside. “I can’t get an internet connection out here, but I can still play minesweeper.”

Gault has no idea what he’s talking about, but grins as if he does. His heart hits his chest like it wants out, and he half hopes he’ll have a massive coronary and die before he gets the chance to ask about what he came here for.

“What’s on your mind?” Frank asks.

“Nothing, I just.” Gault runs a hand over the back of his neck, knows he looks guilty already.

“I could just really use a drink.”

Frank makes a move toward a chest at the end of his bed, then frowns, reels himself in. He looks at Gault to make sure the impression he got the other morning at the coffee machine was correct, and Gault watches him realize that it was.

“Are you sure?” he asks, moving away from the chest.

“You’re right.” Gault bolts off the bed, goes for the door. “I don’t know what I was fucking thinking.”

“Captain, wait up a minute –”

Gault pretends not to hear him and hurries back to his stateroom. He locks himself inside, as if the danger is out there, not inside the room, burrowed forever in his brain. He hasn’t even had to call his sponsor in five years, has gotten accustomed to being at restaurants and parties where everyone but him seems to be a happy, functioning drunk. He turns and punches the door, curses when it cracks into his fist.

He stays in his room for most of the day, tries to write in his log but can’t come with anything that isn’t completely damning. He’s considered writing everything that happened in Rockhampton down on paper, but he knows he’d only grow more obsessed if he did, and is afraid to face the words, to see the sense that it doesn’t make fail to materialize on paper.

Around dinnertime he heads for the kitchen, his stomach hollow and head aching. He eats a bowl of microwave noodles at the counter while the redheaded scientist sits at the table with Faraday, maps spread between them. Their voices drop when Gault enters, and he eats quickly, leaves.

On his way back to his stateroom, he passes the stairs that lead up to the communications room. He can hear Frank’s voice inside; he’s laughing with Minkowski about something.

The idea has barely formed in Gault’s mind before he finds himself in Frank’s room, rummaging through the chest at the foot of his bed. He’s blind with frustration, hissing curses when he can’t find it, and when he looks up with his shaking hands still plunged into Frank’s things, he isn’t exactly relieved when he sees the bottle of whiskey sitting on Frank’s bedside table beside a sticky plastic cup.

He walks down the hall with the neck of the bottle clutched tightly in his hand, telling God he’ll ask for nothing more if he just keeps the hallways clear until he reaches his stateroom. He’s nearly there, free of encounters, when he turns a corner and sees Keamy leaning near his door. He puts the bottle behind his back, pointlessly. Keamy has seen it.

“What the fuck do you want?” Gault barks before he can start. Keamy makes a mock offended face.

“Jesus,” he says, as if this treatment isn’t warranted.

“I’m busy,” Gault says, pushing him away. Bad choice of words, and he waits for the punchline, but Keamy only stands in the hall and watches him slam the door.

He stands near the bed, remembers this feeling, high already off the anticipation. Looking forward to getting drunk, knowing that he would, was always his favorite part. He briefly considers smashing the bottle, but he was never big on dramatic gestures where maintaining his sanity was concerned. He generally goes with the flow. The cap is already off the bottle, and he doesn’t remember doing that, has a frantic suspicion that Keamy might have done it before he throws back his first swallow.

Half a bottle later – maybe, he's lost track – he’s on his back on the floor, finding the ceiling much more amusing than he did earlier. He wants to hug Frank and the bottle and himself for coming to this decision. This is how life is meant to be taken, not so seriously, certainly not soberly. This was always worth the consequences, he just forgot how much.

When Keamy walks into the room, Gault rolls onto his side, laughing. He locked the door, didn’t he? Well, a con man would know how to pick locks. He watches Keamy bolt the door behind him, tries to lift the bottle to offer him a drink, but ends up lifting both his arms. And fuck it, anyway. It’s not like he doesn’t want Martin to come lie on his chest, not like he hasn’t wanted that for fifteen years. Oh, there were moments when he knew he’d forgive it all in a blink, and they were the darkest ones.

“This is more like how I remember you,” Keamy says. He stands over Gault with one foot on each side of his chest.

“Hey, Martin, good, I’m glad you’re here.” Gault sits up on his elbows, takes another swig. “I got some shit I wanted to ask you.”

“Some shit.” Keamy taps Gault’s ribs with the toe of his boot. “I’ll bet.”

“You might want to sit down, motherfucker. This could take awhile.”

Keamy squats to sit on Gault’s lap. He’s heavy and it hurts, but Gault only laughs, lies back on the floor. He blinks at the ceiling, hates the way it moves. This is one thing he never liked about drinking, the way it gets into the landscape and erases familiar lines.

“So?” Keamy says.

“So.” Gault has forgotten all his questions, wants to be put over the side of the bed and fucked hard, though it wouldn’t be quite right, coming from Martin.

“Tell me the fucking history, eh? I want to hear it all. When you knew you could take me for whatever you wanted. What tipped you off. Tell me, goddammit, you owe me that much.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“By what fucking logic did you come to that conclusion?”

Keamy says nothing, puts a huge hand on Gault’s chest. Gault can’t believe how big he’s gotten. Martin was always tall, but he used to be more streamlined. He used to be a runner. Gault’s eyes well up, and he shakes his head.

“Fine, great. Don’t tell me anything. Just get the fuck out then.”

“When did I know?” Keamy leans down, and Gault can smell instant noodles like the ones he ate for dinner on his breath.

“Yeah.”

“I knew that night when I came home bleeding.”

Gault loses his composure, but what he feared would be a cry is soundless, blows apart in his chest and doesn’t otherwise show itself.

“That’s when I knew, too,” he says. Martin blinks down at him, frowns.

“You were such a fucking mess,” he says, fury flooding his face out of nowhere. “It was easy money. I took some of that shit I said to you straight out of gay porns.”

Gault laughs, doesn’t know what else he could possibly do.

“You watched gay porns for material to use on me?”

“I watched them anyway!” Keamy says defensively. Gault laughs harder, wipes his eyes.

“Damn,” he says. “I had some other things to ask you. Why the fuck can’t I think of them now?”

“Cause you’re sloppy drunk, dumbass. I thought you quit?”

“Yeah, so did I. Oh, wait, I remember.” He lets go of the bottle for the first time in two hours, reaches up to grab Keamy’s face roughly.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks. Keamy tears his hand away.

“No, but I’ll fucking hurt you if you do that again.”

“Not now. I meant. Then.”

Keamy gives him the old bewildered look, and Gault would kiss him if he had the energy to lift his head. He wants to say his name a thousand times, until he unlocks something better than an orgasm.

“Why the fuck do you care?” Keamy asks. “You want me to say yes? That will make you feel better?”

“No. I just want to know. That it wasn’t horrible for you.”

Keamy shakes his head. “Why?”

Gault smiles to himself, shuts his eyes. He thinks of the only lesson that ever really sunk in, of sitting in a bus station in Blackwater, penniless and alone, trying to muster the will to stand up and do something, go somewhere, to continue to exist with Martin and his money long gone. The only thing that could get him moving was something that until then hadn’t occurred to him.

_At least I never told him I loved him._

“Forget it,” he says. “Fucking forget it, just forget it. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”

“Bullshit.” Keamy sits back, narrows his eyes. “I was the highlight of your pathetic life.”

Gault shakes his head, points to the whiskey bottle.

“You’re wrong there, mate.”

Keamy snarls, picks up the bottle and throws it against the wall. It shatters into a million pieces and splashes the room with fragrant booze. Gault is so stunned he almost sobers up, but that’s physically impossible, so he drops his head back to the floor, stares up at Keamy with wide eyes.

“I hate that fucking name,” Keamy huffs.

“What?” Fear of death peeks into Gault’s consciousness. Keamy is, after all, probably insane.

“Mate.” Keamy sneers at the sound of it. “I hated it when you called me that.”

“What the fuck did you care?” Gault grabs the collar of his shirt, yanks him down with strength that surprises them both. “You got your money, who gives a shit what I called you? You must have hated all of it, anyway, if you thought I was so pathetic. It must have made your skin crawl, huh?”

Keamy shoves him down, pins his arms. His lip is shaking with some nonverbal protest, wanting the words for something too hard to name.

“I wasn’t that desperate,” he says, like he’s the one with something to prove. “I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t — whatever. It was convenient. You didn’t look like shit back then.”

“Trying to say I do now? Then why the fuck are you tackling me in the goddamn shower? Why are you here now?”

Keamy searches for an answer, and Gault grins at his struggle. He leans harder onto Gault in response, grinds his wrists into the floor.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Gault’s shock is beyond anything that the smashing of whiskey bottles could produce. Keamy is telling the truth.

“Fuck it, anyway,” Gault says, his voice pinching up. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

He hopes Martin can’t hear it on him, that he’s been wanting to all these years, but maybe he can, because he kisses Gault to shut him up. It’s a gesture of the strangest kindness, like the smashing of the whiskey bottle. As long as Martin is kissing him, Gault can’t say anything else he’ll regret. He’s still got his trump card, the only thing Martin left him with, three words he’ll never say.


	4. Chapter 4

Gault wakes from a bottomless sleep and rolls out of bed with urgency when he realizes it’s his stomach that has awakened him. He stumbles to the tiny bathroom attached to his quarters, punches the door out of the way and barely makes it to the toilet before he’s throwing up. He’s in too much pain to appraise the situation until he’s emptied the contents of his stomach, and then the real pain sets in like a net falling over his head.   
  
He washes his face in the bathroom’s metal sink, feels another wave of nausea roll in and spits it down the drain. This was what it was like. This was why he stopped, not because he got sick every morning, but because they all felt like this anyway, impossible to face and already ruined.   
  
He avoids his own eyes in the dirty mirror over the sink, kind of can’t believe how hard he’s shaking. As he walks back to the bed he realizes he’s naked, and when his eyes adjust to the dark again, he sees that he’s not alone. Memories prick at him dully: he stole the booze, he fucked somebody, he’s supposed to be working and will probably get fired. None of this is unfamiliar. Keamy rolls over to look at him, and Gault freezes in place, one knee on the bed, arms trembling against the mattress.   
  
“Martin?” he whispers, momentarily in shock. He hasn’t come back to a bed in fifteen years without wanting Martin to have somehow materialized there.   
  
“What?” Keamy moans. He’s naked, too, a blanket twisted around him. Gault is so grateful for this he’s afraid he’ll lose his mind. Images flick behind his eyes like blurred scenes from an adjoining room’s television: Keamy bent over on the bed, a whiskey bottle shattering against a wall. He turns, and there it is, in pieces.   
  
“Nothing.” Gault falls onto the bed and slides against him. Keamy stiffens but doesn’t move away.  
  
“What the fuck’s wrong?” he asks when he feels Gault shaking against him. He pulls the blanket up and drops it over Gault’s shoulder. Gault can't begin to answer, and he risks inching closer to him, pulls the blanket in tight.  
  
"God, the smell of that shit is going to make me sick again," he says, pressing his face against Keamy's skin to get away from the lingering fumes of the exploded whiskey.   
  
"Yeah, well. Maybe that's what you fucking need."  
  
"You're going to lecture me, really?"   
  
Keamy doesn't say anything more. Gault is terrified that he'll leave, can't believe that he hasn't yet. Slowly reforming memories float just under the broken stripe of his consciousness, and he thinks he might have fucked Keamy last night, he thinks Keamy might have asked him to.   
  
"Goddamn," Gault says. "How the fuck did I get here?"  
  
Keamy stares at the ceiling for awhile, and Gault can hear his jaw clicking as he tries to keep himself from speaking.  
  
"I dragged you," he finally says. "You were on the floor when I came in."  
  
"I don't mean in the fucking _bed_. I mean, I mean --"  
  
"When I first saw you on deck, I thought you'd come here to kill me," Keamy says, and Gault snorts as if this is ridiculous, though it would have made more sense than ending up in bed with him.   
  
"You actually thought I'd be able to kill you?" Gault is flattered.  
  
"No. I just thought you'd try."  
  
Gault laughs, which hurts, and a headache starts at the back of his skull.   
  
"Do you even know what you did to me?" he asks, because he's afraid he'll throw up again if he doesn't keep talking, and he doesn't have anything left inside him but his organs.   
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Do you really? I kind of doubt it, Martin."  
  
Keamy sits up on an elbow, rubs his face. He looks very old for a moment, then the shadows shift, and he looks just like he did the night before he took the money and ran.  
  
"Did you look for me?" Keamy asks.   
  
"What?"  
  
"Didn't you try to figure out where I went?"   
  
"Of course I did! For the first couple of days I thought you'd been kidnapped by that Maori man."  
  
"By _what_?"  
  
"Nothing -- never mind. Hey, listen, can you do me a favor, twenty thousand dollars later? Can you tell me how you got that fucking scar?"  
  
"What scar?"  
  
"This one." Gault takes Keamy's arm and turns it over, finds the scar with his fingertips and traces the length of it. Keamy shudders so hard that Gault jumps.   
  
"Why do you care?" Keamy yanks his arm away.  
  
"Maybe you didn't notice when I handed my fucking life over to you, but you were kind of a big deal to me, once. I'm just curious. I don't see why it should be a secret."  
  
"It's not a secret." Keamy makes a face, as if he's incredibly offended by the word. "You really want to know?"  
  
"Yeah, Martin, I really do." Gault isn't above dropping his name to try and get what he wants. It's only fair.  
  
"I did it."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I did it, right there in the kitchen. You were asleep. I took a knife out of the drawer, cut my arm and cleaned off the knife."  
  
Gault can't react for a moment. He feels as if he's been run over by a car, slapped speechless by the fact that Keamy again seems to be telling the truth.   
  
" _Why_?"  
  
"I wanted to see what you would do. I thought, maybe -- you looked at me like -- whatever. And I'd been gone for awhile, trying to make money, and I wasn't making shit. You had all that insurance money."  
  
"So you -- so you --"  
  
"I had to do something. To get you to, you know."  
  
"To get me to what?"  
  
Keamy groans as if Gault is exceptionally slow, and flushes hard enough for Gault to feel it through the dark. Gault is still shivering, bloodless and desperate, and he leans closer to Keamy, as if the heat of his skin is keeping him alive.  
  
"I just thought. Whatever." Keamy shakes his head. "I knew I could work you if I just got you to touch me. And I knew you wouldn't do it unless, you know. I was bleeding to death."  
  
"How did you know that?" Gault is breathless with surprise, barely gets the words out.   
  
"You were -- fuck, I don't know. Nice."  
  
"What the hell does that mean?"   
  
"You were a good mark. You weren't gonna turn it around on me. But that meant, you know. I had to start things myself. I thought -- on Christmas -- I thought it hadn't worked. I was going to leave for good, quit school, do whatever I had to. But when I came back for my stuff, you were fucking panting for it."   
  
Gault looks down and sees that he's taken Keamy's arm again without realizing it. His thumb crosses the scar, which is white and thick, a small price to pay for what Keamy got away with.   
  
"What did you spend the money on?" Gault asks.   
  
"Plane ticket. Rent. Food. Clothes. Application fee when I enlisted."   
  
"That's it?"  
  
"What the fuck did you expect? Hookers and drugs?" He speaks as if these things are unfathomably beneath him. Gault thinks of him on the couch in Crystal's living room, saying he'd do anything for five thousand dollars.   
  
"Why five thousand?" Gault asks. He had wanted to ask it then. He knows he doesn't need to explain the question now.   
  
"That was how much I needed. That was how much I spent."  
  
"And the rest of my money?"  
  
"I spent it eventually. When I got -- when I left the Marines. Between jobs."   
  
"Goddamn you." Gault hates the tenderness in his voice, blames the tremors still moving through him. "I would have paid for all of that. Anything you asked."  
  
"I know."  
  
"So why didn't you just _let me_?"  
  
Keamy shakes his head, and Gault grips his arm tighter, like a warning. He feels as if he's in purgatory, a place without light, where he and Martin can try and fail to explain themselves to each other until the end of time.   
  
"You didn't want me to join the Marines," Keamy says, as if this is an adequate answer.   
  
"I didn't want you to die."  
  
"Yeah, well. I didn't."  
  
He says so as if this is a personal favor he begrudgingly did for Gault. Gault shuts his eyes against the pressure of his headache, which is pouring in fast now, the flood gates opened at his temples. He feels Keamy lie down beside him. He's still holding onto Keamy's arm, marveling at the way the skin there has stitched itself back together. He drifts into a half-sleep and dreams of Keamy in the kitchen with the knife, thinking about the pay off as he sliced himself open.   
  
"I hope it was all worth it," Gault says, as if Keamy has paid a very dear price for what he did. Of course it was worth it for him. He got away with everything. He's even got Gault back, now. Gault swallows a bubble in his throat that might have surfaced as a sob. Keamy hasn't got him back; he never lost him. And Gault knows he won't have Martin back for long.  
  
"Sometimes," Keamy starts to say, and Gault opens his eyes, then regrets it when Keamy goes silent. He runs two fingers over Keamy's scar, and Keamy shudders less violently this time.   
  
"Sometimes what?" Gault is careful to keep his voice low. Keamy looks down at him, stripped of his poker face in the darkness of the room. He spreads one hot hand across the top of Gault's head and tips it back, points Gault's face toward his. Gault feels his headache dribble away as if it's leaking down the back of his neck, and when Keamy leans onto him he knows he's not going to get an answer, but he doesn't mind getting this instead. Keamy kisses him lazily, sighs into his mouth.  
  
"Fuck," he says, his lips still over Gault's.   
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
Keamy doesn't answer, only kisses him again, slides an arm behind his neck and gets a rough handle on his hip. Gault invents his own answer, swimming between wrecked and delivered, clinging hard. Keamy wasn't afraid Gault would try to kill him when he saw him on board the Kahana. He was afraid this would happen. He knew.  
  
Gault is still too weak and hollow to get fully hard, but he lives vicariously through Keamy for the moment, tries to memorize the thick heat of him with his hand. He knows he'll think about this often, the morning after he destroyed himself, and wants to be able to call back the highlights, too. If Keamy hadn't been here when he woke up -- well. Things would be different already.  
  
Gault is ready to give in to the insane progress of his life, his cock beginning to reawaken as Keamy pushes his legs apart, but then the world quits around him like a stopped clock. There is a great, clanking moan from the bowels of the ship, and silence follows.   
  
Keamy leans up onto his elbows and looks around the room with irritation. Gault watches him in the dim light from under his stateroom door, needs to memorize this, too. He's damp and warm, swollen from the effort of kissing Gault, his quickened breath replacing the sounds of the ship. He wants, Gault has to believe, nothing now but this.  
  
"What's going on?" he asks. Gault draws his hands up along his sides, knows that the easy part is over.   
  
"I think we've arrived," he says.   
  
*  
  
In March, Gault went back to work. He worked from nine o'clock in the morning to two o'clock in the afternoon for the house painting company he'd been with before his injury, and from five to midnight he guarded a ship manufacturer's warehouse near the coast. Crystal was always home from work by the time Gault got back to the house, so the only time he had with Martin was the ride to and from school, and the precious hour after school, before Gault had to drive to the coast to start his shift at the warehouse. This hour was often taken up by track practice, and when it was Gault would sit on the school's metal bleachers and watch Martin run.  
  
He was constantly exhausted, barely sleeping. Anxiety and excitement about their plan to leave clouded him like a demonic possession, and he couldn't think about anything else. Watching Martin race past the other kids during his practices, a small figure down on the orange rubber track, was like a substitute for sleep. It was better, really, and Gault would tilt his head back onto the chain link fence that lined the top of the bleachers while Martin ran his laps, the light changing around him. Autumn had begun, and though the afternoons were still hot, the threat of winter haunted Gault. He told himself they would be long gone before the year's first cold morning.  
  
When Martin was through with practice and dripping sweat, Gault had just enough time to drop him off at the house before driving to his second job. It was hard, every time, to keep driving with Martin breathing in soft puffs beside him, slick and red-cheeked.  
  
"We should move out," Gault said one day when he was driving him home. He was twitching his seat and trying to keep from thinking about the things he and Martin had done in this car the day before. "Me and you. We should get our own place here until we leave."  
  
"No." Martin was already issuing decrees. "We'll save more money if we just stay at my mom's house until we go."  
  
"You don't know how close I am to losing my mind, having to go to bed with her when you're in the next room. Fuck the money, we'll rent a dump and I'll get another job if I have to." Of course, working twenty hours a day would defeat the purpose of living with Martin, and Gault felt close to a mental collapse already.   
  
"It's not just that," Martin said.  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"You don't know what she did to some of those guys."  
  
"What guys?"  
  
"The guys who fucked her over, back in America. It's one of the reasons we left. People were, like. Looking for her."  
  
"People?"  
  
"The police."  
  
At this point, Gault was even charmed when he knew Martin was lying. He chose to interpret this as some sort of protective instinct, and let the subject drop. He was relieved, actually, to postpone his cowardly departure from Crystal's house. He did sincerely fear her wrath.  
  
They pulled into the driveway, and Gault regarded the house with longing. Crystal was at work until ten. If he didn't have his second job, he could go inside with Martin, throw back a couple of beers while he showered, fuck him with his skin clean and warm, and then fall asleep until dinner. It felt alarmingly good to want him so much, knowing he'd eventually have him, on the couch or in the car, and then finally for good once they were elsewhere. Until then, he needed the second job. By May he would have enough money for two one-way plane tickets, Martin's first semester of school, and a few months' worth of rent, but only if he kept working hard.   
  
"Thanks for the ride," Martin said. He leaned over, bracing himself with one hand on the inside of Gault's thigh, and kissed him on the mouth. Gault was nervous about a neighbor walking by, but he let Martin lick through his lips, and held his face with crushing urgency until he pulled away, smirking, cheeks bright.   
  
"Okay," he said, and he got out of the car. Gault watched him walk to the door, and he squeezed the steering wheel as if it could help keep his cock from stiffening. It was often his fate to drive to his second job in a state of feverish arousal, thinking of Martin back at the house, having his afternoon wank before rolling into his blankets, spent. Gault rarely got the opportunity to watch him sleep, and had plans for many weekend afternoons spent doing nothing else once they were in America.  
  
He wasn't drinking much, his usual routine spoiled by his jobs and his exhaustion. When he came home at night he could only get one glass of whiskey down before Crystal started getting ideas, at which point he would kiss her forehead, tell her he was tired and go to bed. Martin stayed up late sometimes just to torment him, leaning on the kitchen counter and flicking his devious eyes to Gault's when Crystal wasn't looking.   
  
"Why are you working so hard?" Crystal asked him one night. Gault was just getting settled in bed, and she was in the bathroom, putting night cream on her face.   
  
"Making up for all the sitting around I did earlier this year," Gault muttered into his pillow, hoping she'd drop it. He heard the bathroom light click off, and she slid onto his back, drew her arms up around his shoulders.   
  
"I hardly ever see you anymore," she said.  
  
"I know," Gault said. "I hate it." He was imagining Martin on his back, saying the same thing. He was always imagining Martin -- while he painted flaking houses in the Rockhampton suburbs, as he sat nearly drifting off in front of a bank of security cameras at the warehouse, and whenever he drove the car. He'd developed a dangerous habit of incessantly glancing in the rear view to look at the backseat, remembering the taste of Martin's breath as it came faster and faster. Even when he was with Martin he was always thinking ahead, picturing their life together in America. He was petrified by the thought of it as often as he was comforted. Martin might meet someone at school. He might have friends who found Gault strange and old. How could they not? And if he somehow got through school still wanting to be an officer in the Marines, there would always be the chance that he could be sent away to die. The possibility of his disappearance was so frightening that Gault could only consider it unreal, a remote and fantastic theory of the end of the world.  
  
"If you hate it so much, why don't you get a normal day job?" Crystal asked. "They're hiring in the kitchen at my restaurant. You'd like the guys who work there. The head chef's name is Tony, he's --"  
  
"S'alright," Gault said, so tired he felt the weight of her like sand bags. He still cared for her, and wanted to help her, but he wanted to help himself more. "It'll only be for a little longer."  
  
"What will?" she asked, rolling off of him.   
  
"I'll quit one of the jobs soon. I'm just trying to save some money." He winced against his pillow, knowing she wouldn't let that slide. Like Martin, she rarely showed interest in anything except what Gault wanted to keep from her.   
  
"For what?"  
  
"It's a surprise," he said, very stupidly. She scoffed.   
  
"I'm not a big fan of surprises."  
  
"This one will be good," Gault said, speaking more to himself than to her.   
  
*  
  
Gault had Sundays off with the painting company, and on Tuesday and Thursday nights another bloke guarded the warehouse. These became holy days for him, and he was like a starved man at a buffet, tripping over himself to enjoy it while he could. It was an early Tuesday evening, Gault sated and thinking about what to order for dinner, when Martin first expressed an interest in contributing to their escape fund.   
  
They were on the couch, a news report about a hurricane playing on TV. With the volume turned all the way down, the images of chaos and the concerned faces of the reporters had a calming affect on Gault, but so did everything else when Martin was stretched out on top of him in his boxer briefs, having a post-fuck drool on his chest.   
  
"How much money have you saved?" he asked Gault. He sat up on his elbow and wiped his mouth, then Gault's chest. Gault was touched by the gesture. He was impressed by everything.  
  
"Almost twelve thousand," he said. Martin's eyes went huge.  
  
"Dollars?" he said, and Gault laughed, nodded. Martin grinned and crawled onto him fully.   
  
"You're, like, awesome," he sputtered. It was the closest Gault ever saw him to wild with happiness.   
  
"Thanks, mate. What should we have for dinner?"  
  
"I have some money, too," Martin said.  
  
"Great, we'll have lobsters, then."  
  
"I'm serious." Martin pushed himself up until he was sitting on Gault's lap, straddling him. "I have fifteen hundred dollars."  
  
"Alright." Gault wasn't sure where this conversation was leading, and wasn't particularly interested. He was content to stare up at Martin, his stomach growling and the aftereffects of his orgasm still thrumming through him. He thought vaguely of the beers in the fridge, the whiskey in the cabinet. Crystal was at work until midnight, and it wasn't even dark outside yet. Overwhelmed by the bounty the evening, he reached up and pulled Martin back down, hummed his gratitude onto his freckled shoulder as he rolled him against the couch cushions.   
  
"I want to help," Martin said. "It's not fair, you're working all the time and I'm just fucking around in school. I want my money to go, you know. Toward America."  
  
 _Toward America_. Gault slid a knee between Martin's legs, squeezed him closer. Sometimes it was Martin he wanted inside him, though he hadn't asked for it yet. He often had a desire to pull Martin into his chest and keep him safe there, hidden. It made his hands shake on the steering wheel when he drove him to school, dreading the moment when Martin would leave his sight.   
  
"Okay," he said, and Martin licked his neck until Gault had forgotten what he'd agreed to.  
  
The hurricane was a greenish threat on the clouds as they left to find some dinner, and it blew bits of trash around their feet when they stopped at an ATM on the way to the market. The bank was closed and its parking lot deserted. Gault was very glad for this when Martin pulled an enormous wad of cash from his back pocket and put it in his hand.   
  
"Where did you get all this?" he asked, counting the bills while Martin pulled a deposit envelope from a crate near the ATM.   
  
Gault looked up when Martin didn't respond, saw him try for a smirk that faded into something else.  
  
"Doesn't matter now," he said, stepping closer to Gault. The wind blew in harder, shaking Martin's t-shirt in waves across his chest.   
  
"Yeah." Gault kissed him quick, tried not to think about it. "Doesn't matter. Listen, I still don't think it's smart to deposit this much cash into an ATM."  
  
"It's fine," Martin said. "It'll be okay."  
  
If Gault had even an eyelash above water, he would have thought this odd, but he was in a hurry to get the deposit over with so they could eat, undress each other, start over. He turned to the machine and made the deposit while the first mumble of thunder picked through the clouds overhead. Martin wrapped his arms around Gault's waist and rested his chin on his shoulder. Gault was afraid they would be seen but glad to have him close. He assumed these increasing instances of physical affection were his influence, though before Martin came along he'd never attached much importance to them himself.  
  
"Storm's coming," he said as the machine sucked in the envelope full of money.  
  
"We'll be back to the house before it hits," Martin said.   
  
Even when he made promises about the weather, Gault took him at his word.  
  
*  
  
Two weeks later, Gault's alarm sounded as usual, and he slapped it off as he climbed out of bed. Crystal had become accustomed to it and didn't wake up at all anymore, which was a relief. He slumped into Martin's room and felt his way to the bed in the dark, crawled onto it to lie beside him. Martin was already awake, but Gault wasn't yet willing to accept the arrival of morning. He shut his eyes and pretended to fall asleep, wished that he really could. Martin sighed, shifted, and slid two aimless hands under Gault's shirt.  
  
"What would you do for me?" he asked, his voice savagely deep, almost a croak. Gault wasn't sure if he'd really intended the question to be heard.  
  
"Anything," he said, his eyes still shut. He felt like Martin had reached down his throat and pulled the word out.   
  
The morning progressed normally from there on, though Gault felt something undeniably strange in the air. They ate breakfast in silence as usual, Martin humped over his cereal bowl and Gault scattering toast crumbs all over the table. Once they were in the car, Gault felt less claustrophobic, and he reached over to slap Martin's knee, as if to wake him up again.  
  
"What's wrong?" Gault asked. Martin gave him the long-suffering look that he always earned when he dared to ask this question.   
  
"I've got a track meet in Gracemere this weekend," Martin said.  
  
"Oh yeah? Are you nervous?"  
  
"Why the fuck would I be nervous?"   
  
"I don't know. Shit, Martin, quit looking at me like that. You'll burn a fucking hole in the side of my head. Do you want me to come, is that why you're telling me this?"  
  
"No. I mean, whatever. I need you to drive me there, so. Will you?"  
  
"Of course I will."  
  
"But don't you have to work?"  
  
"No, fuck it. I'll call in sick."  
  
"You won't lose your jobs?" Martin sat forward slightly, which for him was the only indication of being on the verge of panic. Gault blamed Crystal for his anxiety over asking to be driven to a school event. She must have refused quite often.  
  
"Of course I won't lose them. It's what, Saturday and Sunday?"  
  
"Just Saturday," Martin said, dashing Gault's hopes for a weekend away, a hotel room, trips to the hallway ice machine between drinks.   
  
"I'll be there," Gault said.  
  
"You'd better not cheer or anything stupid. And tell people you're my uncle. Oh, shit, never mind. Your fucking accent. Goddammit. Just tell them you're my mother's boyfriend," he said, as if this was a lie, and actually, it was.  
  
"Can't I just tell them I'm yours?" Gault joked, and Martin jerked as if he'd been slapped, looked horrified.   
  
"Calm down, I'm kidding." Gault laughed and pretended that Martin's reaction hadn't splintered his bones. The last slightly objective quadrant of his mind sparked weakly with concern. He was at the mercy of a teenager.  
  
"What will we tell people?" Gault asked as they pulled up to the school. He'd been trying to force the question back down for ten minutes, to no avail. "When we're in America?"  
  
"We can tell them the truth, there." Martin said so like this was obvious. Gault hadn't expected this, and wasn't sure if it was even what he wanted, though the wind that had been punched out of him returned, his hope inflating again.   
  
"Except I guess I'm not supposed to be a fag in the military or whatever," Martin muttered. They were parked by the school's front steps, a faceless gaggle of kids streaming around the car. To Gault they were like another species, had nothing to do with he or Martin or anything of importance.   
  
"Maybe --" Gault stopped himself, licked his lips. He felt there was a chance here to exploit, but he had to be careful. "Maybe while you're in school you'll find out you want to do something else. Something, you know. Without those requirements."  
  
"Like what?"  
  
"I don't know. There are other jobs that mean something, you know. Things that really matter. I'm not expecting you to work shit jobs like me, but you should keep your options open. Just in case."  
  
Martin turned away from him, looked out the window for awhile at the school. He was going to be late, and Gault stopped himself from saying so.  
  
"You know what I really always wanted to do?" Martin asked.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Be a hit man."  
  
He went stone-faced when Gault laughed, but Gault refused to take him seriously.  
  
"Every teenage boy wants that," Gault said. "Or thinks he does."  
  
"Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. And I don't know if you really want to be calling me a fucking boy."  
  
"Alright, alright. You want to be a hired killer? You really think that's glamorous?"  
  
"I don't think it's anything, I just think I'd be good at it."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I can run fast. I'm good in a fight. I know what people will do before they do it."  
  
"Do you really? And you've got no problem putting a knife through an innocent person?"  
  
"If they've got a hit on them they're probably not innocent."  
  
"But you wouldn't know that, would you?"  
  
"Nobody's innocent anyway." Martin sighed as if he was the one dealing with a naive child, trying to strip him of his delusions. Gault pinched the back of his neck, flicked his ear.  
  
"Go on, before I'm late, too," he said. "Try not to kill anyone at recess."  
  
Martin punched Gault's shoulder before getting out of the car. He leaned back in the open window, folded his arms over the door.   
  
"So you'll take me?" he asked.  
  
"Yeah, Martin, of course."  
  
Gault watched him jog up the steps, the school's courtyard emptying as the tardy bell rang. He was surprised Martin didn't know by now that he would take him anywhere, do anything, offer everything. There were some truths that they would never be able to communicate to each other. Gault was spitting into the wind when he tried to tell Martin he wouldn't disappoint him, and Martin's warnings were hopeless. Gault would never believe that Martin would do anything for the right price, or just for the chance to prove that he could.  
  
*  
  
Gault didn't tell Crystal he'd called in sick to both jobs on Saturday morning, simply said that he had a day off. She was too busy to keep track of his work schedule, and wished him a relaxing afternoon as she headed off for work. Gault almost let her out the door without mentioning that he'd be driving Martin to Gracemere, but then thought it might be more dangerous to try and keep it from her.   
  
"Couldn't he have carpooled with one of the other kids on the team?" Crystal asked. She had paused with the front door open, her hand on the knob.   
  
"I don't know. He asked me to take him and I thought, since I'm not busy --"  
  
"It’s pretty boring," Crystal said sharply. "They just run in circles. The things go on for hours."  
  
"I'll bring a book."  
  
He and Crystal watched each other from across the living room, Gault hoping the jig was up as much as he feared the same. If Crystal threw him out, Martin would have no choice in the matter. He and Gault would have to live together until America.   
  
"You know you're the only friend he's ever had," Crystal said. Gault didn’t know how he felt about this, if it was even true.   
  
"I guess we are friends," he said. His whole body ticked with the force of his heartbeat.   
  
"I wonder what that means," Crystal said. She was moving the door slightly as she spoke, swaying it back and forth with absentminded tension.  
  
"What it means?" Gault wished Martin would walk out of his room and interrupt this, but he was sleeping late.   
  
"He hasn't asked you for money or anything, has he?" Crystal said this very quickly, as if she was hoping to slip it by Gault without his noticing.   
  
"No." Gault smiled, pitied her. If only she knew. Martin had handed him fifteen hundred dollars, had happily watched him deposit it into his bank account.   
  
"Okay." Crystal stared at him for a moment longer, and shut the door very carefully when she left. Gault waited until he'd seen her car disappear around the street corner before locking the door and heading for Martin's room.   
  
The track meet at Gracemere began harmlessly enough. Gault sat away from the other parents and sipped a plastic cup full of Coke that he'd spiked with bourbon. After the meet, he'd take Martin to lunch and sober up before the drive back. Until then, he needed the booze to calm his rattling nerves. He watched Martin take first place in five events, and controlled his urge to clap wildly. None of the other parents seemed to be paying much attention to the event. They were gossiping and eating food they’d brought in plastic coolers, and every couple of minutes one of them would look back at Gault with curious concern. Finally, they sent a father over to investigate. Gault braced himself, hid his cup under his seat.   
  
"Hello," the man said, extending a hand to Gault. "John Horrocks."  
  
"Huston Gault." He immediately regretted using his real name, though he couldn't think of a reason not to. He shook the man's hand, and moved over when he sat down beside him on the bleachers. He was in his forties, Gault would guess, had patches of gray hair over his ears.   
  
"You came with Martin Keamy, didn't you?"  
  
"That's right. He's my girlfriend's kid."  
  
"Nice of you to bring him. I've never met Martin's mum."  
  
"She works a lot." Gault knew he sounded like an idiot, hated himself for succumbing to the desire to have a drink at this thing. He was sure the man could smell it on him.   
  
"Don't we all!" John said, offering a false smile. Gault glanced over at the huddled mothers. Several of them were watching this unfold. He hoped to God it wouldn't be like this for much longer. Martin could already pass for a guy in his early twenties, and once they were in America no one would look twice, except that they would be two men. Gault hadn't yet had a break in his usual anxiety to consider the complications there.   
  
"So we hear Martin's moving back to America to join up with their military," John said. "Very noble."  
  
"He's going to college, actually." Gault's annoyance was beginning to show in his voice, and he hardly cared. "He wants to be an officer, eventually."  
  
"Well, good for him. The coach was a little worried about him when the season first started."  
  
"Why?" Gault didn't really want to know what these people thought of Martin, but he was being prompted to inquire.  
  
"He had that nasty scar on his arm. Wouldn't tell anybody how he'd gotten it."  
  
"He was in a bike accident," Gault said, itching to go for his drink.   
  
"A bike accident!" John clearly didn't believe him.  
  
"That's what I said."  
  
"Sorry, mate, I'm just having trouble picturing Martin on a bicycle."  
  
"A motor bike accident, I should say." Gault kept his eyes on the track. Martin had just finished a 400 meter dash, had his hands on his knees and was panting down at the ground.   
  
"That sounds a bit more like Martin."  
  
"You know him pretty well?"   
  
"Relatively well. Our sons have been running together since Martin moved here three years ago."   
  
"He's friends with your son?" Gault was tired of feeling criminally jealous of everyone Martin had ever interacted with. He wanted always to slink back to the world of the car, where he and Martin were alone and these considerations were irrelevant.  
  
"Not really," John said after a pause. He gave Gault a forced smile. "Martin's a bit -- hotheaded. But you probably know that."  
  
"I guess." Martin actually seemed quite even-tempered to Gault. When he did get mad, he rarely expressed it with more than a disgusted look. "Why do you say that?" he asked, after perhaps too much time had passed.  
  
John laughed a little, as if Gault had asked a very stupid question. Gault glanced at the mothers, and saw that they'd lost interest in him; they were looking now at a fat woman who was ambling up the bleachers with the help of a cane.   
  
"He's got a bit of a history at the school," John said. "But I'm sure your girlfriend's told you all about that."  
  
"Actually she hasn't." Gault saw no harm in admitting to this. A historically troublesome child would not be a single mother's first topic of conversation with a suitor.   
  
"He broke another kid's arm last year," John said. He spoke as if this was a very famous fact, known to everybody in Rockhampton. "The kid was a ruckman for the football team," he added, as if this compounded the offense greatly.   
  
"Boys fight," Gault said.   
  
"Right." John smiled as if he knew something Gault didn't. "Well. It was nice to meet you."  
  
He rejoined the mothers, and Gault reached under his seat for his cup, took a long drink. When the meet ended, Gault walked down to the car, hoping that Martin would soon follow. He came weaving through the other cars fifteen minutes later, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, clutching his gym bag. Gault wanted to throw his arms around him. He felt like he'd been in another dimension for most of the day.  
  
"Well done," Gault said, clapping Martin on the shoulder when he reached the car. "You were brilliant. Especially at the 800 meter, fuck! The rest of the bunch looked like --"  
  
Martin fell against him with a maniac grin, kissed him hard. He didn't even look back over his shoulder to make sure no one saw, but his face had changed when he pulled away.  
  
"Uh," he said. "You're drunk?"  
  
"No, not drunk, just had a dash of bourbon with my soda. You want to go get some lunch?"  
  
Martin shook his head as if he hadn't really heard the question. He stared at the pocket on Gault's shirt, bit down on his tongue so that only the reddened tip poked out through his lips.   
  
"I spoke to that Horrocks bloke's father," Gault said. "What a pot of piss he is, eh? Told me you broke some footballer's arm, I expect he asked for it --"  
  
"You can't just be drunk all the fucking time, okay?" Martin said. Gault was afraid to meet his eyes, had seen this coming. When he looked up, Martin's face was blank, as if this was just another order that Gault would of course obey.  
  
"I know, mate," he muttered, his face heating. "I'm just under a bit of stress right now, can't imagine why." He tried to say this lightly, without accusation. Martin stood staring at him.   
  
"Whatever," he said, reaching around Gault to open the passenger side door. "I hope you didn't say anything fucked up to that asshole."  
  
"He asked me about your scar," Gault said. "I told him you got it in a motor bike accident, just in case he ever brings it up."  
  
Martin rolled his eyes, and Gault was struck by a sudden and breathtaking fear of losing him. He decided he'd have to stop drinking, knew which vice he'd prefer to stick with. Though really, he'd been looking forward to having both.   
  
"What did happen to your arm?" Gault asked when they were driving. He saw Martin smile at himself in the side view mirror.   
  
"I want pizza for lunch," he said, and the subject was closed.   
  
The pizza restaurant Gault chose had pictures on the menu, and a selection beer bottles fanned out underneath the soda choices. He hadn't even planned on drinking with lunch, but now watched with envy as a table of college aged girls ordered a pitcher of beer.  
  
"Hey," Martin said, and Gault broke from staring at a churning margarita machine on the restaurant's front counter. Martin slid his ankle against Gault's under the table.  
  
"Let's stay here," he said. "Tonight. We can get a motel. We'll tell my mom we had car trouble."  
  
Gault was too excited to ruin this by reminding Martin that they'd already used that excuse. He reached across the table and tugged at his collar, pressed into the soft heat of his neck with his knuckles.   
  
"Sounds good to me," he said, trying to ignore the fact that his bliss was a bit blackened at the edges. He would have Martin all night, could fall asleep sweating against his skin while the TV played like a lullaby, but he wouldn't be able to raid the mini-bar. Martin had asked him to quit, and he had promised anything.  
  
*  
  
Gault was sober for ten days before he stopped on the way home from his second job to drink two beers at a filthy bar near the beach. He felt incredibly guilty, decided it wasn’t worth it, and went to a gas station afterward to buy a pack of sickeningly strong peppermint gum. He chewed five pieces on the way back to the house, but was still afraid Martin would know he had been drinking.   
  
When he got inside, he was both relieved and disappointed to find both Martin and Crystal already asleep. He opened the fridge and saw Crystal’s half empty bottle of chardonnay on the door, figured no one would know or care if he had one glass. He got the bottle out, took a tumbler from the cabinet, and was working on the cork when he heard Martin cough from down the hall, inside his room.   
  
The wine went back into the refrigerator, the tumbler back into the cabinet. Gault felt saved, irritated, impatient. It was nearly April, and he had been pestering Martin to set a definitive date for their departure. He was waiting, also, for Martin to notice his complete sobriety and tell him that he didn’t want him to stop drinking entirely, but Martin hadn’t brought it up yet.   
  
He crept down the hall, glad that he’d stopped at two beers and still had his wits about him. Turning Martin’s door knob was a terrifying exercise, but he finally managed to open the door with only the tiniest click. He slipped inside the dark bedroom and shut the door just as carefully behind him.   
  
“It’s me,” he whispered as he came toward Martin’s bed. He stepped out of his boots and crawled onto the mattress, curled his hand around Martin’s side. His eyes adjusted in the pale glow from behind Martin’s mini-blinds, and he saw Martin looking up at him with what seemed to be immense relief, which was not what he’d expected.   
  
“Long fucking day,” Gault said as he deflated around Martin, slinging a leg across his body and tucking his face against his cheek. Martin said nothing. He grabbed the belt loop on Gault’s trousers to hold him in place. Gault realized that he was still wearing his security guard uniform, laughed.  
  
“Why don’t we just leave tonight?” he mumbled, though he knew Martin wouldn’t entertain the idea. In some sense that Gault would never understand, Martin wasn’t ready to leave his mother. Gault wasn’t sure that he was ready to take him from her, either.  
  
“You worked late?” Martin asked when Gault had nearly drifted to sleep. Gault opened his eyes. He’d gotten home two hours later than usual.   
  
“I actually went to a bar.” Gault hadn’t meant to admit this, was a little concerned about the fact that he had.   
  
“Oh.”   
  
Gault waited for more of a reaction, wanted to know one way or another if this was allowed. A cold drop of sweat ran from Martin’s temple down to Gault’s nose, and when Gault shifted he heard the stitches on his belt loop rip.   
  
“Jesus, Martin –”  
  
“Are we like, actually going to do this?” Martin asked. Gault sat up to look at him, and reached down to feel for the damage done to his work trousers. Martin was still holding onto to the belt loop, the ripped away portion squeezed into his hand.   
  
“Actually – what?”  
  
“You’re not going to change your mind?”  
  
“About leaving? Are you joking, mate? Didn’t I just tell you we should leave tonight?”  
  
“You never sound serious when you say that shit.”  
  
Gault laughed, then felt guilty when Martin released his belt loop, let his hand flop down to the mattress.   
  
“I am serious,” he said. “You want to leave? We’ll go right now.”   
  
“What about the thirteenth?” Martin said. “We could leave on May thirteenth.”  
  
“Why the thirteenth?”   
  
“Why not the thirteenth? It’s the day after I graduate.”   
  
“Okay. Okay, the thirteenth. I’ll buy the plane tickets. And I need to start trying to sell my car. I was thinking I could get about four thousand dollars for it –“  
  
Martin flipped him onto his back, and slid a hand over his mouth when he laughed. He fumbled at Gault’s belt buckle with his other hand.   
  
“I like your uniform,” he said. Gault grinned under his palm. Martin cupped him through his trousers, and Gault exhaled like he’d been holding his breath since he came through the door, arched off the mattress and went light-headed as his blood rushed to his cock. Martin crawled backward, ducked his head to Gault’s lap.   
  
“Will you fuck me wearing this thing?” he asked. The question was barely audible, Martin’s mouth moving over the khaki material that was now straining to contain Gault’s erection.   
  
“I’ll fuck you wearing a pot of petunias on my head if that’s what you want.”  
  
Martin grinned up at him, and Gault was glad for the dark room. He was so happy to be home; his eyes were wet. He felt like he’d been away for a long time.   
  
“Get up on your knees,” Martin said. Even when he was getting off on Gault’s sorry imitation of authority, he was still calling the shots. Gault scrambled to obey, and watched as Martin freed his cock from the trousers, hummed with relief and pulled his hands through Martin’s hair. It was long enough to squeeze between his fingers now, had darkened with the end of summer.   
  
“What do you want?” Martin asked, looking up at him, his eyes shaded wickedly. They weren’t being quiet enough, but Gault was far past caring.   
  
“My cock in your mouth,” Gault said. “Now.”   
  
Martin stuck out his tongue, leaned forward and drew just the tip of it over the leaking head of Gault’s cock. Gault mostly swallowed his moan, and his fingers tightened in Martin’s hair when he took the whole length of him in.   
  
“Yeah,” he let himself say in a sigh, his eyes sliding shut. He rocked just slightly as Martin’s sucked him in slow, wet slides, and moved his palms down to flatten Martin’s ears against the side of his head. He couldn’t decide if feeling this good proved he didn’t need the beers, or if they’d heightened a blow job to epic proportions. His legs began to shake, and he had to reign himself back with a hiss when Martin reached between his legs to slide hot fingers over his balls, then behind them.   
  
“Wait,” he gulped, pushing Martin back until he was free of his mouth. Martin struggled for breath, licked his lips.   
  
“What do you want?” he asked.  
  
“To fuck you. So bad, oh God, Martin –”  
  
Martin nodded rapidly, started tearing off his clothes. Gault left his uniform on, looked down to see his slicked cock jutting out from the undone fly and knew he’d never wear it again without imagining Martin’s hand down his trousers every time they shifted over his lap.   
  
“Here,” Martin said, lying back on his pillow. He reached up for Gault. “I want to be able to see you.”   
  
Gault leaned forward to let Martin’s ankles rest on his shoulders. He took one in each hand, and watched Martin’s face as he guided Gault’s cock between his legs. His mouth was open, chest heaving, his hair destroyed by Gault’s fingers, sticking out at odd angles. Gault slid down to kiss him as he entered him, and they huffed simultaneous groans of satisfaction into each other’s mouths.   
  
They couldn’t risk speaking with the volume of their voices too unpredictable, so they watched each other’s lips and mouthed stupid, filthy things that they’d be too embarrassed to say out loud. _You like being fucked, yeah?_ and _give it to me hard_ and _you like that cock deep up your ass, you little slag?_ Gault was so worked up he was afraid he’d lose consciousness, one hand tight around Martin’s ankle and the other braced against the wall behind his bed. When Martin came all over the front of his uniform, he stopped fighting his own climax, and pumped it into Martin until he had to bite down on his palm to keep quiet.   
  
Martin fell asleep breathing soft on Gault’s collarbone, his muscles going heavy one by one in Gault’s arms. Gault was cracked apart at having to leave him, tried to prolong his stay in Martin’s bed as long as he could. His cock sagged uncomfortably against the open zipper of his trousers, and he grinned at the thought of returning to work in the uniform, with the smell of Martin still on it. He wouldn’t dare wash the stains off; he rarely interacted with anyone else at the warehouse, and anyway it was dark in his security station. It was something he could carry around with him, the closest he would get to holding Martin safe and secret inside his chest.  
  
*  
  
In April, Gault began to get organized. He rented a post office box and had the plane tickets to America shipped there, and put an ad in the newspaper in an attempt to sell his car. One night, when he came home from the security job, Martin met him at the door, clearly drunk, and told him he’d made it into the college he’d applied to.  
  
Gault didn’t ask to see the acceptance letter. The fact that he might have wouldn’t occur to him until much later. He hugged Martin, kissed him on the ear after he’d checked to make sure Crystal wasn’t around, and drank four beers while sitting on the couch beside him, his arm wrapped around his shoulders. He felt he’d regained permission to drink, under appropriate circumstances. All of this was more than he’d dared to hope for.   
  
He would go over the weeks leading up to their planned departure thousands of times after everything unfolded, searching for something he did wrong, anything that might have sent Martin running. Aside from his own consuming anticipation, they were mild weeks, the weather growing cooler but not yet cold. He drove Martin to school, painted houses, picked him up, guarded the warehouse. Martin was now more likely to be awake when he got home, Crystal more likely to be asleep. Gault rarely saw her except when he fell into bed, the dark shape of her across the mattress like a distant mountain. When they were together she was perfectly pleasant, seemed tired.  
  
“I guess Martin will be leaving us soon,” she said once at dinner, as if he belonged to both of them.  
  
Gault got nervous at the sight of police cruisers on the road, had to remind himself that he wasn’t doing anything illegal, wasn’t planning a kidnapping. Sometimes he wished he could sit Crystal down and tell her everything, apologize. Later he would be very glad that he hadn’t.  
  
Martin did not attend his graduation ceremony, which was on a Wednesday afternoon, the twelfth of May. The thirteenth would be a Thursday. Gault had come to find the very day of the week romantic in the previous weeks, looking forward to it. He often suspected that the world would end before it actually came to pass; he’d once felt the same way about his own eighteenth birthday.  
  
Crystal made lasagna for Martin on the night of his otherwise unmarked graduation. Gault took the night off from his security job, which didn’t matter much, as he wasn’t planning on ever going back. It was a thrill to think of his bosses waiting, wondering where he was, and of how profoundly what they thought and how angry they became would no longer matter to him.   
  
He had planned on staying sober, to make the flight to America easier if nothing else, but got drunk anyway. Crystal had cheap champagne, red wine and beer, and Gault sampled all of them. He hoped that Martin would join in, that they would sympathize with each other’s hangovers on the way to the airport in the morning, but only Crystal seemed enthusiastic about drinking with him. Martin had half a glass of champagne and two plates of lasagna.   
  
“So when does school start?” Crystal asked Martin over dinner at the kitchen table, a red candle in an old Chianti bottle melting down to a stub.   
  
Gault would have been suspicious if he’d known that she didn’t ask to see a letter, either.   
  
“August,” Martin said.  
  
“We’ll have to get you a plane ticket.”  
  
Gault chugged wine, and had a second helping of lasagna though the state of his stomach was apocalyptic and Crystal was a terrible cook.   
  
“What are you going to study?” Crystal asked.  
  
“History.”  
  
They both heard her try to contain her scoff.   
  
Gault went to sit on the back porch while she did the dishes. He held a beer between his knees and looked up at the sky, which was blanked clear by a layer of clouds. The screen door creaked open, and he didn’t have to turn to know that it was Martin. He patted the space beside him, inviting him to sit down, and realized that he’d once sat here with Crystal, plates of steak in their laps. Sometimes he forgot that he’d been alive before Martin. All of that, the rest of his life, seemed so remote and unfortunate. Martin sat beside him, took his beer and drank some of it before handing it back. To Gault, this was better than a kiss. He was on the verge of telling him everything – _God, I love you_ – but Martin spoke before he could.   
  
“Come to my room tonight,” he said. “Okay?”  
  
Gault did as he asked, couldn’t sleep anyway. He waited until Crystal was dead asleep, and snuck into Martin’s room. Martin was sitting up in bed, his knees pulled to his chest. Gault stepped up onto the bed and sat behind him, stretched his legs out around him. Martin leaned back onto his chest, turned to sigh against his neck.  
  
“Oh, goddammit,” he said, his voice buried deep. “I haven’t been sleeping too good.”  
  
“Me either. Fuck it, we’ll be in the air tomorrow. We’ll have the whole summer before you have to start school. We can sleep until noon.”  
  
Gault had sold the car, and had over twenty thousand dollars to get them started in America. He could afford at least a month off of work, would do nothing but whatever Martin wanted. Life seemed suddenly and ridiculously easy. It was like a puzzle that had taken him far too long to solve.   
  
Martin touched Gault’s knee, and ran his hand down to his ankle. He reached back to scratch a hand through his hair, traced down the length of his arm and moved his thumb in tight circles over each of Gault’s fingers, as if he was trying to memorize his prints.   
  
“Are you worried?” Gault asked.   
  
“Yeah,” Martin said. “I mean. No.”  
  
They had sex for what Gault didn’t know would be the last time. Of course, it wasn’t actually the last time, and soon this would be just as hard to believe. Martin kept slipping his fingers in Gault’s mouth, so often that Gault began to wonder if he was looking for something there. He stayed in Gault’s lap, moving on him with languid exertion. He was facing away from him, eyes shut. Gault had never really noticed before, but Martin had almost never shut his eyes after that first time.   
  
“You’d better go,” he said when Gault was lying behind him on the bed, trying to convince himself that his panic was unwarranted. It would all go smoothly, just three hours from now. They would walk out the door. The taxi they’d hired would be waiting. The airport would be bright and busy and welcoming. It would be like arriving in heaven.   
  
Gault rolled him over to kiss him before he got out of bed. Martin reached back and caught hold of his ear, his nails biting into the back of it. Gault laughed and cursed him, kissed the edge of his eyebrow.   
  
“Watch it,” he said, rubbing his ear.  
  
“Sorry,” Martin whispered.   
  
  
*  
  
Gault’s alarm went off as usual. Crystal would think he was leaving for work. He hadn’t been asleep, had only drifted off for a few scattered minutes, his dreams disturbing and not worth remembering. He got out of bed and dressed with shaking hands, reminded himself that even if Crystal caught them, there was nothing she could do. He looked back at her one last time. Her mouth was open on her pillow, and she looked a bit like Martin. Gault turned and left, shut the door quietly behind him.   
  
It was still dark, not yet seven o’clock in the morning. Gault felt his way along the familiar path to Martin’s bedroom, opened his door with extra precaution, almost perfect silence. He left the door cracked behind him, hoping that Martin would already be awake and ready to go. His heart was a gun firing again and again and again. This was the rest of his life, the good part.  
  
When Martin didn’t meet him in the middle of the room, he leaned onto the bed. His hands swept across the mattress, and nothing really registered until they found the wall. The sheets were still warm. He stood up, turned around and searched the dark corners of the room. When he saw nothing, he flipped on the light.   
  
He wouldn’t let himself be even slightly perturbed. He walked out to the living room, found the couch empty. Checked the kitchen, the bathroom. The yard. The taxi he had scheduled the day before was waiting by the mailbox, out in the street. He walked out to make sure Martin wasn’t already in the backseat.   
  
The taxi driver’s cheer, his offer to help with luggage, was what finally convinced him. It was suddenly so out of place, a stomach-turning irony. The reality of the situation came at Gault like a flash flood, and it was in his lungs before it reached his mind. He was gulping dirty water, too far gone to do anything else. There was nothing to do but go back into the house.


	5. Chapter 5

  
Gault sat at the kitchen table in Crystal's house for a long time, waiting for his thought process to reform. He had a little bit of whiskey, just enough to get the taste in his mouth. The color of the sky as the sun came up was like a chorus of mocking laughter raining down around his ears, and he wished it would at least rain. A hurricane would be better.  
  
When he heard the sounds of Crystal moving about the bedroom, he considered leaving. He'd secreted away his car to the man who'd bought it as Crystal had constructed the lasagna the night before, so he would have to call another taxi. He'd sent the previous one away an hour ago. He listened to Crystal's shower run and turn off, heard drawers being pulled open in the bedroom. He couldn't seem to get himself to move.   
  
Crystal came out dressed for work, her hair wet on her shoulders. She smiled at Gault as if it wasn't unusual for him to be staring into space at the kitchen table at ten o'clock on a weekday morning. He watched her pour herself a glass of orange juice and get her cereal down from the cabinet. He didn't know what to say or do or even think. He only wanted to sit quietly for a little while longer, watching the yellowing light move across the laminated table top.   
  
"He's gone, hasn't he?" Crystal said. She had her back to Gault, was stirring sugar into her cereal at the counter.   
  
"I don't know," Gault said. He was surprised that his voice came out normal, worked fine. "I think. Yes."  
  
Crystal came to the table, set her bowl and her juice in place, and stared at Gault until he looked up to meet her eyes. They were just like Martin's, only not blue. Gault had never seen blue eyes like that in his life. He thought of Martin's father, and wondered if Crystal had once felt the same way about his.   
  
"I expect you'll be going now, too?" she said.   
  
Gault felt like the room was upside down, like he had woken up to somebody else's life and the chance to return to his own was rapidly slipping away.  
  
"Did you really think I didn't know?" she asked, her smile stretching out slowly. "Do you really think I'm that stupid?"  
  
Gault put his hands over his face. He couldn't deal with how much she was reminding him of Martin at the moment.   
  
"Then why would you let me," he stuttered. "Why didn't you throw me out?"  
  
"Because." She sat down across from him, put her hands in her lap. "You thought I was wrong about him. And I wanted to be here to see your face when he proved me right."  
  
Gault got up from the table and went for the door without looking back at her. He expected her to start cackling like a witch in a fairy tale, maybe to throw a knife at his back.   
  
"And anyway," she called as he opened the door. Her voice was chopped to pieces now. "I didn't mind the company."  
  
He left, though he suddenly wanted very badly to stay with her. This was mostly because she was what he had left of Martin, and he got away as quickly as he could, walked down the road without direction. Temporary solutions began to come into focus as he made his way toward town. He would get drunk, get a hotel room, try to figure this out. Maybe someone had taken Martin. He cursed himself for not checking his room for signs of a struggle. He thought of the Maori man who'd come to the door, of John Horrocks, of the footballer with the broken arm, complied a list of paranoid delusions.   
  
He didn't realize his bank card was gone until he owed thirty dollars for five drinks at Mr. C's.   
  
  
*  
  
Gault's younger brother drove down from Ingham to pay his bar tab and pick him up. He didn't arrive until almost four o'clock in the afternoon, and Gault was close to asleep on a table by the time he got there. He'd had another five drinks, a fish sandwich, and a basket of chips by the time Bowen walked into the bar. Gault's bill came to one hundred and six dollars.   
  
"Here we fuckin' go again," Bowen said when they were in the car, driving back up the coast to the town where he and Gault grew up. Bowen still lived there with his wife and two daughters, still worked at the goddamn sugar refinery.   
  
"Fuck off, this is different," Gault mumbled. He knew he wasn't sober enough to keep anything in, and this worried him only in the vaguest sense. At the moment the whole story seemed kind of hilarious, and he kept catching himself wanting to go home and tell Martin.   
  
"Different? What, it's not a woman this time?"  
  
Gault laughed so hard he knocked his head against the window. Bowen cursed and shoved him.   
  
"Huey, it's enough!" he said. "You're too old for this."  
  
This, of course, only made Gault laugh harder.  
  
"How right you are!" he said between hiccups, wiping at his eyes.  
  
Gault blacked out for the rest of the drive, had no memory of arriving at Bowen's house or being dragged up the stairs to the attic guest room. He woke up confused the following morning, feeling as if he was full of holes, missing not just one thing but many irretrievably scattered pieces of himself. He reached across the mattress, knew Martin wasn't there but needed the pathetic exercise of looking. He said his name a few times into the lace pillow he'd slept on. It was the sort of thing Bowen's wife liked to make and give to the family as Christmas presents. Gault breathed in its dusty scent even as tried to forget where he was. He imagined himself instead in America, in a hotel in California, Martin flicking through the channels on TV while Gault read the newspaper, looking for apartments for rent, cars for sale, job postings. He wasn't ready to get angry, or even to feel humiliated by the suddenly apparent foolishness of everything he'd done in the past six months. He only wanted to cling to his fantasies for as long as he could. He couldn't even yet imagine what Martin was doing without him.  
  
At two o'clock in the afternoon, Bowen's wife Leslie knocked on the door. She was a petite woman with light brown hair who Gault had known for most of his life. Growing up, he'd always suspected she had a bit of a crush on him, until she married Bowen, who was the real reason she'd often come to visit their childhood home.   
  
"I've brought some toast if you're up for eating," Leslie said, entering the room with a plate and a bottle of water. She set both on the bedside table and put her hands on her hips, regarded Gault with sympathy. They had been through this before. Gault stayed with Bowen's family for almost a year after his divorce. He stared up at her from the stacks of pillows on the bed, didn't touch the food though he was hungry.   
  
"What's happened?" she asked. She sat on the end of the bed and put her hand over Gault's ankle.   
  
"I've lost some money," he said.   
  
"How much?"  
  
"All of it."  
  
Leslie shut her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. She squeezed his ankle like an admonition.   
  
"Bad investment?" she asked.  
  
"You might say that."  
  
"Well." Leslie turned toward him fully, like she was ready to offer the advice that would change his life. "Why don't you take a shower?"  
  
He did as she suggested, and lingered under the hot water in their tiny upstairs shower until he'd run it out completely. When he was out, he dressed in a stack of Bowen's clothes that Leslie had left on the bed in the attic. He found her downstairs, folding laundry on the couch and watching soaps. She paid him the mercy of saying nothing all day as he sat beside her, aside from telling him that he should eat something. She tsked when he found a bag of crisps in the pantry and ate from it while standing in the middle of the kitchen, took it from him and made him a ham sandwich.   
  
"I'm going to get the girls from school," she said around three in the afternoon. The words sliced Gault open, and he bent forward on the couch, chewed his lip until the urge to lose his composure had been trampled.  
  
"You'd better come with me," Leslie said, standing in the foyer with her keys.   
  
"Afraid I'll kill myself if you leave me alone?"  
  
"I dunno, love. You look worse than you did after Wendy left you."  
  
"After I left her, you mean."  
  
"S'not what she told me, but have it your way. C'mon, you look like you could do with a bit of air anyway."  
  
Gault was in no condition to refuse anything asked of him, so he rode with her to his nieces' school, slumped in the passenger seat and imagining that this was how Martin must have felt, being driven around, though he already knew he was kidding himself that he could ever imagine what had gone through Martin's mind.   
  
"Are you still sick?" his younger niece, Meredith, asked him when she and her older sister Kim were installed in the back seat.  
  
"Yes," Gault said. Leslie smacked him.  
  
"Don't tell her that," she said.  
  
"Is it contagious?" Kim asked.  
  
"God, I hope not."  
  
Leslie smacked him again.  
  
He had dinner with the four of them that night, drawn back into the world of his childhood, the financially strained parents muttering conversation about their disappointing days while the children listened in anxious silence. Bowen matched him beer for beer.   
  
"So you're broke, I heard," he said. Leslie made a distressed, apologetic sound, and Gault imagined their whispered conversation before dinner.   
  
"Seems that way," Gault muttered into his plate, embarrassed under the eyes of his nieces.   
  
"Haven't got a job?" Bowen asked.  
  
"I had a couple of them in Rockhampton, but I'm never going back there."  
  
Bowen scoffed as if this was precisely the answer he'd expected. Gault pushed his green beans around on his plate, listened to the clock on the living room mantle click around its circle.  
  
"Why aren't you going back to Rockhampton?" Kim asked. She was twelve, almost thirteen, and looked just like Bowen would have as a girl.   
  
"Because a bomb went off there. It's contaminated."  
  
"Really?" Meredith squawked. She was eight years old and a bit wall-eyed, looked like she might grow up to read palms for a living.  
  
"Huston," Leslie moaned.  
  
"Not really," Gault said. "Figuratively."  
  
"What does that mean?" Meredith asked.  
  
"It means he's fuh -- he's gotten fired and he's not welcome back," Bowen said. Gault didn't bother to correct him. The truth was much worse.   
  
He tried to help Leslie clean up after dinner, but she shooed him away. He took a beer out to the backyard, contemplated the sky.   
  
"Martin," he said, expecting something to happen when he heard it out loud. Nothing did.  
  
Eventually, Kim came out to sit beside him on the moldy stone bench where he'd settled. She smiled at him as if she had a great secret to tell.  
  
"Want to see a constellation?" she asked.  
  
"Okay." Gault killed the beer, stuck the empty bottle under the bench.   
  
"There's the swan," she said, pointing at the sky. Gault saw no shapes there, only pale stars in random patterns. "It's called Cygnus."  
  
"Did you learn that in school?"  
  
"Yeah. Mum says you're heartbroken."  
  
Gault shook his head, looked out at the weedy yard.   
  
"I'm in shock," he said.   
  
"On account 'a your heart?"  
  
"Hey." Gault ticked her chin. "You sound like you're from Queensland."  
  
"I am from Queensland."  
  
"Right. That's what I used to say to my dad when he told me that."  
  
Kim chuffed at his attempt to change the subject, reminded him of Bowen.   
  
"Are you gonna get over it?" she asked.  
  
"I dunno. I don't think I've even gotten into it yet."  
  
Kim stared at him with Bowen's unforgiving scrutiny, kicked at the damp grass under the bench. It was hard to believe she was closer to Martin's age than he was. He hated to even think of it, but had already accepted the fact that Martin would enter into his every consideration for the rest of his life.  
  
"It's good, though?" Kim said. "Being in love?"  
  
"Who said I was in love?"  
  
She frowned. "You were, though, weren't you?"  
  
Gault looked up at the disorganized stars. A rough, squarish group of them did not, to him, make a swan.   
  
"If I was, I don't especially recommend it," he said.  
  
Kim followed his gaze, smirked up at the sky as if to signal someone who was eavesdropping.  
  
"Liar," she said, almost too quiet to hear.  
  
*  
  
For a week, Gault was in a state of suspended animation. His initial, completely overwhelming misery was rather cozy, as it had been when his mother died: the house crowded with family, her sisters cooking and gossiping in the kitchen, an excuse to drink more heavily than usual. Then the collection of friends and family went home, returned to work, got on with their lives, and his mother was still dead. It was like a great, sunlit room suddenly emptying out, the dust in the air becoming starkly visible.  
  
He did not report Martin to the police or try to regain his money. The story was too embarrassing, and he'd saved the money for Martin anyway, had only wanted to exchange this generosity for Martin's company. The thought of what this made him was sickening, and he never told anyone what had happened. Only Crystal knew the truth.   
  
He was drunk for two years, functioning but barely. The winter of the first year was an unusually rainy one, relentless and gray. Gault got an apartment outside of the Ingham suburbs and pulled crab traps for a local company from four in the morning until three in the afternoon. He tried to be sober for Sunday dinners with Bowen's family, occasionally succeeded. Afterward he would go out and get pissed at a bar he and Bowen used to sneak into when they were sixteen. He got arrested for driving drunk twice, and Bowen only bailed him out the first time.   
  
Theorizing that Martin's gender might have been the real problem, he tried going back to dating women. He was still good looking -- he would remember this occasionally with bemused wonder, like finding a fiver in an old pair of jeans -- and he had no problem drawing bar flies and even college girls if they'd had enough to drink. He had, however, lost the ability to get it up while drunk, and he never made any attempts while sober. Eventually, he gave up on the women, but didn't dare approach any men. He didn't know where to start, and none of them looked enough like Martin.  
  
Things came to a point in May of 1994, when Kim mailed him a tape of her new favorite band. They were called Weezer, and Gault didn't expect much, but he was touched by Kim's continued faith in him, though he suspected it had more to do with angering her father than actually believing he was worth a damn. Regardless, he received the tape with drunken fondness and listened to it with the special gravity that only the teenaged and intoxicated can muster. Maybe it was just May, a month that now felt like drowning, but it probably had more to do with the fact that he was on a historic binge and hadn't left his apartment in four days. Whatever the reason, he became quickly obsessed with two of the songs on Kim's tape, fast forwarding and rewinding until he'd listened to them back to back well over a hundred times. "The World Has Turned and Left Me Here," and "Say It Ain't So." The volume got progressively louder, as did his apparently alarming attempts to sing along.   
  
He didn't remember getting arrested for punching his landlord, a bony man in his sixties who constantly chewed tobacco, only knew that at some point he'd come to be in a jail cell, where he heard Leslie's cheerful and beleaguered voice out in the office of the police station, negotiating his release.  
  
She drove him out to Taylors Beach and parked near a holiday park full of campers. They could just see the ocean through a gap in the trees that crowded the campground. Leslie turned off the car and looked ahead through the windshield for awhile. Gault didn't feel any pressure to speak, waited. He was ill in such a familiar way that he was able to ignore it. The fact that he was still a bit drunk aided in this.   
  
"You know I got depressed after I had Meredith?" Leslie finally said. Gault squinted in the dim campground light, tried to make sense of this.   
  
"I didn't know that," he said.  
  
"Yeah, it was postpartum, I guess they call it, only I thought it was just me. I tried to kill myself."  
  
He turned to look at her with wild surprise, and reached over to touch her shoulder as if she was still in some danger, as if she needed to be held in place.   
  
"What? How?"  
  
"Never mind how. I guess it was pretty unenthusiastic, really. Only Bowen knows about this." She pulled her teeth over her lower lip, looked back out at the ocean. "And Kim."  
  
Gault got the feeling he shouldn't ask. He squeezed her shoulder, blown out of his own disaster for a moment. Leslie had always been plucky, good for Bowen and her daughters and everyone else in the world. The fact that she'd ever suffered a single moment of self doubt was demoralizing.  
  
"Everybody's got something they'd like to forget," she said. She took Gault's hand from her shoulder, kissed his knuckles. "That's alright. You don't have to keep punishing yourself, whatever it is. You're not ruined."  
  
After he'd been sober for five years, Gault had this tattooed in black cursive script above his left hip bone. He would put a hand there and squeeze the sharp point of the bone when he needed to remember.   
  
_You're not ruined._  
  
The rest of his life without Martin was better, though never as good as the two summers he'd been promised. With a loan from his AA sponsor, a man who owned two radio stations and had once lost far more money than Gault due to decisions made while drunk, he started his puny fishing company and did alright for himself, made some real friends and a few enemies as captain of his own boat. He discovered the internet and anonymous gay sex. This went on until it became almost as damaging as the drinking, and he eventually gave it up in favor of dating, with little success. He fell in love with two alcoholics, couldn't relate to anyone who didn't drink even after he'd quit. These relationships were more about flirting with temptation than anything else, and they didn't last. He sold his fishing company for a bit of money, and felt lucky when Widmore Industries called up with a job offer, as if he'd finally caught a break.  
  
He thought about Martin less consciously as the years passed, but dreamed about him always. In his dreams he was often back in Rockhampton, searching the entire city for Martin after hearing a rumor that he'd returned. Occasionally he dreamed that he was flying to America to search for him, but the plane never landed, sometimes even crashed. Martin was never locatable in his dreams, aside from a few rare instances where he showed up to dismiss Gault with a bored half-acknowledgment, or to flaunt some girl or man he preferred.   
  
There was only ever one dream that ended well. It was just six months after Gault had stopped drinking, and he was living with Bowen and Leslie again, sleeping in the attic bedroom. It was six o'clock in the morning, just before the possibility of a lucid dream. Gault woke once, checked his alarm, and fell back into a deep sleep. When he did, he dreamed that he was standing in Crystal's dark house on May thirteenth, looking for Martin. He checked the bedroom, the couch, the kitchen, the bathrooms, the yard. Finally, hyperventilating, he came back to the middle of the house and realized that if he only screamed Martin's name loud enough, he would appear. Knowing it would work, he did, and Martin leaned in through the front door to grin at him.   
  
"What's wrong?" he asked. "Are you freaking out? I knew you would. I'm just outside. I've been outside the whole time."   
  
Gault rushed to him and took his hand to ensure that he wouldn't slip away again. They went together to the waiting taxi, got into the backseat and rode away toward the airport. Gault pulled Martin into his lap and tucked him in tight, remembered the smell of him like nothing his waking senses could comprehend. Martin laughed at his sentimentality but went boneless and punch drunk in his arms, the way he'd done on New Year's Eve, when Gault said his name so many times it hurt.   
  
Gault knew, even in the dream, that they would never actually make it to the airport. This was a world without a future, and the sun would never rise. He kissed Martin's face and pulled him in closer, didn't care. He hadn't realized it until he lost him, but this -- the backseat of a car, Martin ducking his eyes and smirking against his skin -- had always been enough.   
  
*  
  
Gault knows he'll lose him again, he just doesn't know when.   
  
He waits, his less relevant uncertainty easily masked beneath everyone else's. His crew is waiting, like Keamy, for orders. Gault is hoping they will never come.  
  
The days are relentlessly bright, reminding him of the last, stale days of summer after Martin disappeared. Gault sleepwalks through them. At night, he sits at the communal table in the kitchen, beside Keamy, who can silence the men he leads with half a look. At the other end of the table, the scientists whisper among themselves. Gault wishes he was creative enough to envision the apocalypse that is surely coming, and he's grateful, too, that he never could, never will.  
  
He wants to be drunk all the time, so badly that it's like a thing in the room with him that he can touch but won't get near. Maybe it was always this way and he's just never had the balls to think about it. He avoids Frank, who knows what's going on and probably feels sorry for him, and shadows Keamy, who knows everything and has nothing more to say about any of it. There is nothing to drink, anyway, and the ship feels like the world without God that Gault's Pentecostal aunt once warned him about. It's the real hell, people wandering around and wondering what's wrong because they can't even remember emptiness, but Martin is here, too, and hell is banal in comparison.  
  
"I saw your mum once," Gault tells him the night Brandon dies in the infirmary under the hands of a blank-faced doctor Gault didn't notice on board until people started getting sick. They're lying in the darkness in Gault's stateroom, both on their backs, Keamy above the sheets and Gault under them. Keamy doesn't say anything, but Gault hears his breathing go quiet, like he's trying suddenly to hide.  
  
"You know, years later. After you'd left. I rang her up because part of getting sober is making reparations, yeah? I had to apologize."  
  
Keamy scoffs, which is rewarding. Gault would reach for him if he wasn't so completely worn down and hot and if he didn't feel as if they're always already tied together by the weight of the air, here in hell.  
  
"I'm sure she forgave you," Keamy says, and it's clear through his angry sarcasm that he needs to believe she didn't, so Gault doesn't go on to tell him that yes, she did.   
  
"It's just part of the process," he says instead, offering himself up. He keeps waiting for Keamy to grab his hipbones and throw him against the wall, take something out on him that he'd really rather enjoy, but apparently that is not why he's here. Keamy still likes being fucked, and Gault experiences this as a kind of miracle, though over the years he has discovered that he does, too. It strikes him as a funny thing for the two of them to have in common.  
  
"Was she old?" Keamy asks, and Gault has to bite his lip hard to keep from laughing.  
  
"What the hell kind of question is that? She was old _er_. Haven't you -" He stops himself before asking if Keamy has seen her since he left home. Of course he hasn't.   
  
"I'm surprised she didn't kill you," Keamy says.   
  
"Me too. I think she pitied me."  
  
"I bet."  
  
"That's how you felt about me, eh? Thought I was pathetic?"  
  
"Yeah."   
  
Keamy doesn't sound especially enthusiastic about the opportunity to insult him, so Gault sits up on an elbow and touches his hair in an attempt to irritate him further. He figures that if he ruins this on purpose it won't be nearly as bad. Keamy ignores him, moves his lips around like he's got a piece of ice in his mouth.   
  
"Something's not right," he says.  
  
"No kidding."  
  
"I don't mean about you." Keamy glances at Gault's shoulder, and it takes all of Gault's long-tested willpower to keep from leaning down to kiss his hairline in gratitude for this remark, though it's more a dismissal than a reassurance.  
  
"I know," Gault says. "I was up there on the deck today. Minkowski and Brandon -- I don't know what happened. It doesn't make any sense."  
  
"It's something to do with Linus," Keamy says. "Widmore told me that he has, I don't know. Powers."  
  
This time, Gault can't stop himself from laughing, but Keamy doesn't seem bothered by his disbelief.   
  
"Powers? Like what? Is he some kind of fucking wizard?"  
  
Keamy grins, and Gault loses his willpower, slides onto him and licks under his jaw. His skin is rougher than Gault once knew it to be, and dark from time spent on deck. Gault thinks about Linus with his powers and realizes for the first time that Keamy might die here.   
  
"Haven't you got powers of your own?" Gault asks. He crawls on top of Keamy in a half-assed attempt at having another go, then loses his sense of direction and just lies there feeling like a bug on the surface of a lake.  
  
"You know I don't," Keamy mutters, and it seems to Gault a very strange thing to say. He doesn't know how to respond except to fall asleep, Keamy's hard stomach pushing against his. He's still half-awake when Keamy rolls out from beneath him with a groan, and he deliriously imagines that Keamy will stay awake all night, that he has come here not for comfort or nostalgia or amusement but to act as a sentry. Gault would laugh at the irony if he wasn't nearly asleep. The only two things he ever needed protecting from are here in this bed.  
  
*  
  
A crew member named Regina dies next, followed shortly thereafter by Minkowski, but not before the ship is boarded by two people from the island where Linus is hiding. Frank brings them back in the helicopter, along with the body of the woman who traveled to the island with the scientists, bringing the body count to at least four. The scientists are missing. With every hour that passes, things happen faster and make less sense.  
  
Gault regains a sense of responsibility, and spends most of his days making sure the prisoners are secure -- they're tricky and rarely are -- and assisting Frank in futile attempts to repair the communications equipment. Frank doesn't mention the whiskey. They've got bigger problems now.  
  
"Your friend's been bugging me about getting to the island," Frank tells Gault one afternoon when they've given up untangling ripped wires in favor of sitting on the communications room's steps and staring in at the equipment hatefully.   
  
"I just don't feel right about it, not until we hear from Faraday and the others," Frank says. "Not after what happened to Naomi."  
  
"He's not my friend," Gault says.  
  
He finds Keamy that evening before dinner, standing at the stern and watching the horizon like he's hoping to catch a glimpse of the island that Gault is starting to despise from afar. He looks huge, standing there with his hands on the rail, like he could get to the island if he really wanted to, like he could wade through the ocean.   
  
"You've got to be patient," Gault says. He stands beside Keamy and feels larger than usual just by proximity. "Frank says you're bugging him."  
  
"Frank's bugging me. He can't give us orders."  
  
"You can't, either."   
  
"Bullshit." Keamy turns to Gault and gives him the weary look that Gault continues to find unsettling. It seems cruel and impossible that Martin has aged. He is a new person who Gault doesn't really know, but then he never really knew the old one, either.  
  
"Don't go," Gault says, hoping Keamy will know what he means. His face burns, and he looks down the deck to make sure no one is witnessing this, though on the surface they are just two men having a conversation.   
  
"Don't tell me what to do," Keamy says.   
  
"I'm not telling you, I'm asking. Though I could tell you if I wanted to. I'm actually in charge here, you fuck."   
  
Keamy stands up straighter, his lips parting slightly as if in surprise. Gault hasn't forgotten that he likes being ordered around, at least nominally.   
  
"That's great," Keamy says. "You're in charge. I guess we're fucked, then."  
  
"Coming from someone who likes being fucked, I'll take that as a compliment." Gault grins when Keamy flinches as if to hit him.   
  
"Why --" Keamy starts to ask, then just shakes his head and walks away. Gault watches him go, sympathizing with his frustration. He doesn't know why he's doing this, either.   
  
He eats dinner alone in his room, avoiding the others and the thought that there used to be more of them. He's not sure if he can be blamed for the deaths, but if he is, he's ready to face the consequences. He cannot go back to living in quiet determination without Martin, and there is no chance that they will leave this ship together. If he has to go to prison, he will accept it as a welcome distraction.  
  
Keamy shows up earlier than Gault expected, and finds him reading the protocol Widmore gave them for the sixteenth time since people started dying. It still holds no answers, and he puts it away while Keamy locks the door behind him.  
  
"What's going on out there?" Gault asks him this every night, even if he's just been out there himself.   
  
"The usual."   
  
Gault has no idea what that could mean, but he doesn't care enough to ask. Keamy is unfastening his belt, his eyes cast downward as he walks toward Gault. He smells like the air outside, brings it into the room with him.   
  
"Well, who would have thought." Gault says this every night, too. Keamy has made no response so far, and Gault wouldn't be surprised to learn that he fully expected this sort of reunion someday. Or maybe he just hopes that he did. Keamy gives him a beseeching look, and Gault is tired of always making the first move, until he makes it, and then he's glad as hell. He yanks Keamy forward, and Keamy lets himself fall like he hasn't had this in years, though he had it last night and this morning. Gault licks into the heat of his mouth and squeezes the fabric of his shirt into his fists until he hears stitches popping at the collar.   
  
Gault is shaking with the need to be broken open, split in half, but he's learned by now that Keamy needs this more than him and there's no use in asking for anything in return. He drops to his knees, pulling Keamy's trousers and shorts down with him, and draws his tongue in quick traces along Keamy's already stiff cock, until Keamy is pulling his hair and begging in a wordless grunt. Gault smirks and palms himself through his trousers, thinks he might fill them up just for the trembling weight of Keamy looming over him, his pinched-up face pointed toward the ceiling.   
  
"Tell me," Gault manages, the breath in his lungs going carbonated, his whole chest shattered with anticipation. Keamy pulls his hair in response, and Gault winces. He draws just the tip of his tongue across the head of Keamy's cock, purple-red and already slick.   
  
"Fuck, God, _please_ ," is all he gets out of Keamy, and Gault wishes he had enough resolve to break him and get thrown over the side of the bed, but he never was patient when it came to games like this. He takes Keamy into his mouth, and absorbs his shudder as he lets out his breath, his hand going limp on top of Gault's head. Keamy gurgles some combination of _God_ and _yeah_ , all the better for the fact that he tried to swallow it. Gault likes to think that he's impressed with his improvement in this area over the last fifteen years. He still likes the taste of Martin's cock better than any other he's had, and didn't realize how vividly he remembered it until he had it in his mouth again.  
  
When Keamy starts rocking into his mouth a little too forcefully, Gault reaches up and puts a hand on his stomach to stop him. He slides back slow, lets Keamy watch the spit trail from his cock to Gault's lips. Keamy swallows audibly and nods as if Gault has asked him a question, stumbles out of the trousers and shorts that circled his ankles and crawls onto the bed, sits up on his knees. Gault goes for the mini bottle of hand lotion they've been using as lube; he's pretty sure Keamy stole it from one of the dead girls.  
  
He kneels behind Keamy and wraps a hand around his waist, slicks himself with his cock positioned just under Keamy's ass, already pulling him apart with every clumsy stroke, his knuckles a jagged tease. This is the part when he forgets feeling empty and starts to like being in control, Martin biting his lip to hold down an angry moan, keeping himself steady by reaching back to grip both of Gault's thighs, his fingers tense enough to bruise.   
  
"You want this?" Gault asks, though Keamy never plays along. He carefully sets the tip of his cock in place, listens for the hitch of Keamy's breath. Keamy squeezes Gault's thighs until his short nails have dug in as far as they can, and Gault is afraid he'll draw blood, leans forward to bite his ear like an answer.   
  
"Gonna fuck you so hard," he says, right in Keamy's ear, his lip touching the searing hot edge of it. Gault would be willing to bet that Keamy has never blushed in all his life, but the backs of his ears give him away.   
  
"So hard, Martin," he says as he pushes in slow, holding Keamy apart with his thumb and forefinger. It's just an excuse to say his name, and to hear him barely bite down a sigh that might have come out like a whimper, some wordless expression of gratitude.  
  
Gault makes good on his promise, pushes him onto all fours after a few thrusts. It doesn't really make sense that Martin would love this, would brace himself against the mattress so he can slam back rough and wide open, but hell if Gault could ever figure this guy out, and he's not too worried about it at the moment. This is the best thing in the world; he would always forget that when he was drinking. It gets better and better and when it's too good to stand it leaves behind a humming sense of satisfaction, a sort of inverse hangover. He has regretted it before, sure. But not now. Now he gives everything to Martin knowing he'll get nothing back, will probably be robbed blind and unimaginably wrecked, but this time he knows, too, that it's worth it.   
  
He moans a never ending chant of Martin's name when he comes, thrown forward onto his back by nerve-splitting relief, soaked in sweat and sort of wallowing in the scent of Martin's neck. They both tumble over onto the bed, and Gault pulls out with a wince, still throbbing and raw. He rolls Martin onto his back without pausing to catch his breath. Martin is sleepy-eyed and puffy-lipped, looks like he's been in a fight. Gault kisses him once, then pulls back to watch his face while he strokes him off. Martin stares up at him, unembarrassed, until his eyes finally flutter shut, and Gault can feel Martin's orgasm climb through his cock before his come spills over his hand. Martin allows himself a shuddering sigh, his eyes still shut, and Gault licks the side of his nose, because he doesn't know what else to do with how happy he is at the moment.  
  
"Motherfucking hell," Gault huffs. He collapses onto his side and laughs. His stomach hurts, and for a few seconds he doesn't know where he is, only that he's in good company, good being defined very nontraditionally. Martin stays on his back, dazed and still half-gone, shine of spit in the corner of his mouth. He coughs, and Gault kisses him, can't help it. Martin receives it like everything else, with laconic acceptance. His hand slides across the small of Gault's back, and that's enough.   
  
"People are dead," Gault reminds himself aloud. He can feel the warm waters of contentment rising to his ears, threatening to cover his head. He won't survive this if he forgets for even an instant that it won't last this time, either.  
  
Martin blinks at him as if he can't imagine what this has to do with anything.   
  
"I thought you were," he says before Gault can work up a projected rant about his indifference.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I lied, before. When I first saw you, the second thing I thought was that you might try to kill me. The first thing I thought was that you were dead, and I was seeing your ghost."  
  
"Well, that's as logical as anything else you've ever said, I suppose."  
  
Keamy smiles with weird gratitude, like Gault is the first person in a long time who's been dumb enough to insult him. He tucks his arm around Gault's back properly, and goddamn if Gault isn't dying to fall for this again.  
  
"It was only for a second," Keamy says. "It was just the first impression I got. You looked dead."  
  
"I was. Am. Whatever."  
  
"No, you're not." Keamy's hand snakes around Gault's side, and he touches the tattoo over his hipbone. "What's this?"  
  
"That's nothing. It's to do with getting sober. You wouldn't be interested."  
  
Keamy doesn't argue that, but runs his fingers over the words like he's reading a secret message in their texture.   
  
"I didn't know," he says, every word bitten out like he's speaking an unfamiliar language.   
  
"Didn't know what?"  
  
"Nothing. I don't know. Maybe I did. Whatever." He looks up at Gault, unapologetic and tired. "I thought you must be dead because it would be too weird if you weren't. Then I thought you could be here because you knew I would be, and that you'd try to kill me. You seemed freaked out when I talked to you, but I thought it might be an act. I figured if I came up on you in the shower like that I could get you back on my side like I did when I was a kid. And then - And now -"  
  
Gault is consciously holding his breath. He stares at the pulsing hollow of Keamy's throat, doesn't want to interrupt, though if this goes any further it will complete his undoing.  
  
"The other thought I had was that you might be working for Linus, you know, like he had hired someone who really fucking hated me to screw with this mission." He looks up at Gault without any apparent expectation, as if he's prepared for Gault to tell him that yes, this is what is happening.   
  
"But you're not, right?" he says, and Gault is almost too stunned to answer.   
  
"I don't hate you," Gault says. "Obviously."  
  
"How is that obvious?"  
  
"Fucking hell, Martin. I'm not going to explain it to you."  
  
"But you should hate me. Anyone would."  
  
"Yeah, no shit. You think I haven't realized that? You got me good, you can congratulate yourself. And if you're scamming me again, well done. I clearly don't learn from my mistakes, don't know how to hold a grudge or generally behave like a person who does any thinking whatsoever."  
  
"But I'm serious," Keamy says, his thumb stretched across Gault's tattoo.   
  
"I'm sure you are. About what?"  
  
Keamy takes Gault's face in one big hand, tips his chin so that their eyes meet. His hand feels like a bomb shelter to Gault, a warm place to hide. He would do anything, but there's no way he can convince Keamy this is true, which is probably for the best.  
  
"Don't try to fuck me over," Keamy says. It translates to a kind of marriage proposal, as far as Gault is concerned, and he's going to blame the booze but then remembers he hasn't had any.   
  
"Martin," Gault says. "You're delusional."  
  
"Fuck you, just tell me I'm wrong."  
  
"That means you're wrong, genius. But yeah. Of course you're wrong."  
  
"It's so fucking hard to believe that you of all people would be out to get me? And you'd try to play the same shit I played on you, to get even?"  
  
"Is it so hard to believe I'm simply an idiot? Even if I'd come here planning something, which I didn't, I'd have chucked it by now."  
  
Martin doesn't look quite convinced, and Gault opens his mouth to tell him, _I love you, you dumb shit, never had a reason and still don't_ , but not saying it once kept him alive, and the memory of being glad for this is too strong.   
  
"This is a big deal," Keamy says after Gault's neck has begun to ache. He takes this as permission to break eye contact and flops onto his side.   
  
"What is?" He has some ideas about what Keamy is talking about, but doesn't expect him admit to any of it out loud.   
  
"Capturing Linus. It's a big payoff. I could retire and only take jobs I want."  
  
"Fine, great. What sort of jobs would those be?"  
  
"Interesting shit like this."  
  
"Yeah, well. It has been interesting."  
  
Gault considers asking for a kind of life history, an account of the uninteresting jobs and boring fucks and close calls. More than anything, he wants a minute by minute description of the day Martin left. He wants to know what they served for dinner on the plane to America, how much the taxi to the hotel cost, how lonely and pointless Martin felt when he arrived and sat on a king-sized bed, alone.  
  
"You could fuck me," Gault says, not particularly optimistic that this will work. "It'd be like sealing the deal."  
  
Martin snorts. "What deal?"  
  
"You know, the deal. Oh, never mind."  
  
He rolls onto his stomach and pushes one hand under the bed’s single pillow. Martin usually steals it at some point during the night, but for now he just turns his head so that it’s pressing down over Gault’s hand.   
  
“I might go to the island tomorrow,” Martin says.  
  
“Asking for my permission?” Gault says, furious. Now that things are looking up, in their dysfunctional way, Martin is off to get himself killed. This is the way the world works; it’s one thing he has learned, from his own experience and from soaps.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Just thought you’d tell me in case I have any last words? Things I needed to get off my chest before you die?”  
  
“I won’t die, fuck!”  
  
“I know.” Gault feels guilty, wishes he’d been thoughtful enough to express some confidence in Martin’s abilities. “I’m talking out my ass. Just be careful. Or don’t go. Mostly don’t go.”  
  
“You can ask me something,” Martin says. “If you want. I won’t die, but you can ask me something.”  
  
Gault never anticipated that he would be drifting off to sleep during the conversation he has envisioned obsessively for fifteen years. He had millions of questions for Martin, but suddenly can’t come up with one. He does remember that they all basically amounted to _how could you_?   
  
“What’s it like to kill someone?” he mumbles into his pillow.  
  
Martin answers immediately, as if this was the question he’d anticipated.  
  
“It’s like anything else,” he says. “You decide to do it, and you do it.”  
  
“Not everything is like that.” Gault has never made a conscious decision in Martin’s presence. Martin is something that happened to him. Though maybe it’s true that he let it happen.  
  
“Did you ever regret it?” Gault asks. “Right afterward?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Do you think you ever will?”  
  
“If it’s something I’d regret, I wouldn’t do it.”   
  
Gault scoffs. “Must be nice.”  
  
Martin turns toward him on the pillow, breathes against his temple and pushes their shoulders together.   
  
“What?” he says. “Cause you’ve got a lot of regrets?”  
  
“Oh, fuck, Martin. Maybe regret isn’t the right word. Hindsight, or something.”  
  
Martin hums in agreement, as if this is something he understands. Or maybe, by now, Gault is dreaming.  
  
*  
  
The rest happens in a prolonged, sleepless blur, and Gault understands it, from the moment it begins, as the end. He watches the helicopter go, Martin aboard it with his soldiers, and knows there is a reason he can’t look away even after it’s long gone, though he can’t or doesn’t want to put words to it yet.  
  
Martin is gone for a day that feels longer than the past fifteen years. Gault has fooled himself, again, into thinking that he has a real claim on a directionless future, fights visions of an apartment in some American city, Martin posturing about taking new jobs but too distracted by whatever he’s been looking for in Gault to actually do it. And they’ll have Widmore’s money, and the lessons of the past. Gault laughs at himself, but can’t turn his mind away from this.  
  
Then night falls, the helicopter returns, and Keamy puts a gun in Gault’s face before he’s gotten ten words out to anyone else on deck.   
  
“Keamy!” Gault shouts, which is his first mistake, but he doesn't recognize him as Martin anymore. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, mate?”  
  
And the “mate” seals it, probably.  
  
“You gave me up,” Keamy says. The decision he’s already made covers him like a hopeless series of trip wires: his eyes are empty, his posture stooped and ruined as if he's carrying something very heavy.  
  
“What?” Gault spits automatically, wishing to God he’d anticipated this, but he’s wished for that before.  
  
“Linus knew who I was,” Keamy says, his voice an alien energy that disorients Gault, sends him helplessly adrift. “He knew my name. He knew everything about me.”  
  
Gault doubts very much that anyone on earth knows everything about Keamy, but it’s the bit about knowing his name that slices across his middle like a knife. The sacred name. Benjamin Linus, the outlaw, knows it and spoke it like he’d earned it.  
  
“No,” Gault says, surprised with his own calm, though he understands it as a sign that things here are finished. “I’m not the one who gave you up.”  
  
He brings Keamy to what’s-his-face the lying janitor, revealed by one of the prisoners as a spy, and it’s a useless exercise that ends in the janitor somehow surviving Keamy’s attempts to blow his head off. Gault calls him Martin twice during the exchange, but Keamy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s shifted into something Gault can’t get near. This is an evil place that speaks to the evil already in him. Gault never doubted Martin’s potential for disinterested destruction, maybe once admired it.  
  
He stupidly thinks that bringing Keamy to his stateroom will remind him who he really is. He bolts the door behind them as a sign of trust, maybe, and Keamy flips over the desk. Gault watches him pace the room, resigned already to something he did not expect. For the past twenty-four hours, he has thought of nothing but Martin’s potential death, and the fact that he’s alive is still rewarding, even when it is also frightening.  
  
“He knew, you motherfucker.” Keamy won’t look at Gault, which is worse than a fist in his face. “I wasn’t even supposed to kill her, but he knew and then – Widmore told me not to kill her, that was something – but I forgot – he knew –“  
  
“Her?” Gault says, watching this from the wall. Keamy kicks the bed, and the mattress bounces askew.  
  
“Yeah, and a kid, too.” Keamy looks at him, or through him. “So there’s your answer.”  
  
He goes to the door and struggles with the bolt as if he suddenly has no idea how it works. Gault pulls at his arms and gets flung away, never realized how easily Keamy could have disposed of him all this time. It’s touching and significant and too late.  
  
“Please,” he says as they’re walking down the hall, and then he explains his vague theory about the deaths, the cabin fever straight from hell.   
  
“I would be derelict in my duty if I didn't point out that this might be exactly what's happening to you,” he says, more desperate than he expected this semi-rehearsed line to sound. Keamy is beyond the agitation of the stateroom, steely-eyed now.   
  
He asks for the key to the safe Widmore told them not to open except in an obvious emergency. Gault doesn’t want this to be an obvious emergency, but when he refuses, Keamy pins him against the wall like a moth. Gault realizes, again, how incredibly outmatched he’s been all along.   
  
“Thank you,” Keamy says when he takes the key from around Gault’s neck, and Gault wants to stutter some sort of apology, but he hasn't done anything wrong. He feels drunk in the worst way, confused and ready to pick a fight that he knows he won’t win.  
  
Ultimately, none of it matters. Keamy makes like he’s going to shoot Gault in the face, then asks him to fix his gun. Gault doesn’t know what’s wrong with it or how to fix anything that might be broken, but he agrees, and Keamy goes.   
  
Gault helps the prisoners escape after he realizes that Keamy will happily kill everyone on board. He is the only one who has earned this fate, and watches the prisoners leave in the Zodiac, their floppy castaway hair blowing back behind them. He thinks: there are other people in the world. In the past ten days or so, he’d sincerely forgotten.  
  
Then it’s nighttime, Gault with Keamy’s gun on his belt, and Keamy kills that useless doctor, slits his throat and throws him overboard. Gault rushes down to the deck, afraid that Frank will be next. He remembers what Keamy said about choices, and realizes that he has two. He can believe that Keamy was always a blank automaton, fast and good in a fight, a born killer with nothing else to aspire to, or he can believe that Martin had nothing sinister to gain from their recent interactions, and that whatever was left of him for Gault to perhaps preserve was spoiled by the same thing that made Brandon and Minkowski go crazy before their brains blew out through their skulls.   
  
He chooses, without any real consideration, the latter.   
  
And still he goes down to the deck with a gun, to avenge the death of a man whose name he never bothered to learn, because there are a lot of those in the world, and they might have treated him better than the one who only smirks in response to his threat. And the next to last thing Gault says is Martin’s name, something like:  
  
“Stand down, Martin, or I will fire.”  
  
Keamy knows this is a lie, and Gault realizes too late that, whoever Martin now suspects of working for Linus, this is his real betrayal. Keamy has something taped to his arm, and Gault screams across the deck, asking everyone and no one:  
  
“What’s that on his arm?”  
  
It is something he’s asked before, about the cut on his arm, that bleeding wound that first brought them together in his mother's kitchen, the thing Martin had to do to get Gault to lay hands on him. Before Gault can really appreciate the symmetry, Martin – Keamy – shoots him in the heart. It takes the surprising heat of his own blood for Gault to realize that this was of course, of course, the only way things could end.  
  
His last thoughts are a jumbled and frantic collection of reasons Martin should believe that he didn’t betray him to Linus, supported by very legitimate examples. But he’s bleeding on the deck and too angry to even be sorry that he didn’t come up with these things sooner. He wants some memorable last words, but he seems to have lost the ability to speak, and anyway all he can come up with is nonsense that again only amounts to _how could you_.   
  
He hopes to God, as his blood pools around his ears, that they’ll throw his body overboard without searching his pockets. He feels the presence of his wallet in the back pocket of his trousers like a screaming admission, and with his last conscious thought he prays it will go with him to the bottom of the ocean.  
  
In the drinking years after Martin’s disappearance, he periodically checked the post office box in Rockhampton. He became accustomed to the hollow, metal sound of its emptiness, like all the dreams where he searched for Martin and found nothing. But once, just six months before sobriety and the surrender of the post office box, he received a postcard from Arizona. It had a picture of the Grand Canyon on the front, the sunset supernaturally pink overhead.  
  
He dies with the comfort of a strong desire: that no one will dig the postcard out of the tiny square he’s folded it into in his wallet, behind pictures of Bowen’s kids that have gone gummy at the edges, and that no one will read the words that meant too much for too long.  
  
 _Thanks for the money.  
See you in hell.  
\--Martin Keamy_  
  
More than the fact that he’d sent anything at all, the two potentially incriminating names Martin had signed broke Gault open whenever he took the postcard out and smoothed it across his knee. Martin had given him the names to keep, and Gault had never expected him to try and reclaim them. He did not expect any of this, and it is amazing, with his life in immediate hindsight, how grateful he still is for all of it.


End file.
